It’s hard to believe that it’s already April. The early days of the new year when we were just getting our EARTH issue rolling feel like yesterday. Now, flowers are coming up, the sun is setting late, and our conversations are turning to CITY, our fifth issue which will begin its release in May. 

Since EARTH started, we’ve gained nearly 400 new subscribers – and we’re thrilled to have them here (if you are one of them, hello!). Along with these new faces, this issue allowed us to connect with writers, academics, and activists both near and far, and we’re extremely grateful for the connections it has seeded.

Our EARTH issue at a glance:

ḥačatakma c̓awaak (Everything is interconnected) | Isabela Vera with Charlotte Coté (podcast)

Lesbian Land | McKenzie Schwark 

Sin ellas no hay maiz ni país | María Villapando (Spanish-language version coming soon!)

The Broken Promise of California Cuisine | Francis Northwood

More Radical Than It May Seem | Alice Ragland

Building Power with Black Farmer Fund | Zoë Johnson with Melanie Allen and amanda david (podcast)

BONUS: Envisioning Feminist Food Futures Through Agroecology | Lucy Harding, Dora Taylor, and Hester van Hensbergen 

EARTH was a big and varied issue. Yet, as always, we were surprised and delighted by the resonances that emerged across its contributions. One theme that came up, again and again, is that of dis- and re-connection from the land — across cultures, borders, and time. In some cases, these dis- and re-connections relate to modernity: In her piece “Lesbian Land”, McKenzie Schwark talks about our present condition of absorbing nature through a screen (it resonates with an excellent piece by Barclay Bram for Vittles on the rural nostalgia of Chinese cottage-core). Francis Northwood’s “The Broken Promise of California Cuisine” unpicks the troubles of seeking to care for the Earth by voting with our forks. María Villapando meanwhile, points to the ways in which more “modern” modes of cooking (namely gas stoves) might undermine tortillera women’s connections to longstanding traditions. These connections are tied to place and central to the survival of native maize. Her piece is titled “Sin ellas no hay maiz ni país”, meaning “Without them, there is no corn nor country”, and we will be publishing a version translated into Spanish very soon.

In other pieces, disconnection from the Earth is borne of oppressive, racist forces. In a podcast interview with Isabela, titled “ḥačatakma c̓awaak (Everything is interconnected)” Dr. Charlotte Coté, Professor in the Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Washington and author of A Drum in One Hand, A Sockeye in the Other: Stories of Indigenous Food Sovereignty from the Northwest Coast, tells us about how a connection to the land, the lifeblood of Indigenous culture and community, has been disrupted by colonialism and the genocidal residential schools and describes efforts to reclaim these connections by restoring ancestral foodways. Dr. Alice Ragland’s personal essay, “More Radical Than It May Seem”, and Zoë’s podcast interview “Building Power with Black Farmer Fund” with Melanie Allen and amanda david, both explore the long history of systematically disconnecting Black people in the US from the land. This disconnection began with their forced removal from Africa and the Caribbean as part of the slave trade and continues through to the racist agricultural lending practices of today. For Alice, Melanie, and amanda, reconnecting with the land is — as it was for their ancestors — an important form of resistance against systemic racial oppression. As amanda put it in the interview, “land and our connection to land via agriculture [and] herbalism is really the root of our power.”

Shifting power, and putting land back into the hands of women, non-binary folks, and people of colour is essential to building a more just and sustainable food system. In Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth, Carol J Adams and Lori Gruen stress how ecofeminist theory gives us the tools to both expose and oppose intersecting forms of oppression. FFJ’s work has always sought to illuminate the intersections; we see them with many pieces in EARTH. In “Envisioning Feminist Food Futures Through Agroecology”, Lucy Harding, Dora Taylor, and Hester van Hensbergen reflect on how the Oxford Real Farming Conference (ORFC) has sought to be a space where we consider all the earthly relationships that maintain us. Violence by what Adams and Gruen term the “capitalist heteromasculinity” against women, people of colour, people with disabilities, the environment, and non-human animals are one and the same. The ORFC authors call for us to (re)situate ourselves in networks of justice and care that appreciate the Earth and all the life on it as our kin, and do away with extractive systems of domination. They describe how agroecology (which cannot solely be conceptualized and enacted through a Western lens) is one pathway for doing so.

The call to see ourselves as part of an inextricable web echoes that made by Animal liberation activist Harley Mcdonald-Eckersall in our interview with her last July, where she asserted that for her, “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.” In EARTH, we see how looking at issues in a vacuum may anesthetize us to collective liberation. The lesbian back-to-the-land movements of the 1960s documented by McKenzie sequestered themselves in rural areas, creating mini-utopias where some members claimed to no longer feel the need to go out to the streets and march for equality. It was political but not all at the same time, just like today’s practices of absorbing aesthetically-pleasing sapphic videos on TikTok or, as Francis’ piece highlights, paying a pretty penny for a fancy peach picked by a famous farmer without considering how California’s other agricultural workers are going to be paid and treated fairly. 

Seeing struggles for liberation as linked also allows us to acknowledge and reconcile the ways in which land (re)connection movements and aims might be conflicting. Adams and Gruen write that ecofeminist theory “stresses the need to attend to context over universal judgements.” EARTH explores how Black farming movements can be sensitive to the harms of private land ownership in capitalist settler-colonial contexts. This comes up in Alice’s piece and also Zoë’s podcast interview with Melanie and amanda. EARTH also examines how to navigate the gendered and cultural sensitivities of using firewood sustainably (this is María’s piece), how to support alternative agriculture without abandoning the fight to end the harms of the industrial model (as in Francis’), and how to create safe spaces for women to dream without disengaging from political action in support of the environment and other gender subjectivities (that’s from McKenzie).

Finally, EARTH also revealed how our connections to the land are deeply gendered. (We call her “Mother Earth” after all.) Just as we expect the soils of this planet to sustain and care for us, we have — now and throughout history — tasked women with the same. Caring for and feeding communities, including through the conversion of earth into food and medicine, takes a great deal of knowledge, skill, and ingenuity. This is knowledge and skill that has so often been passed down through generations of women, despite the ruptures of colonialism. We see this with María’s description of tortillera women in Mexico and in Alice’s essay, which highlights the wisdom of enslaved Black women in the US who, by growing food and medicine, took back a modicum of control over their cultures and bodily autonomy. It is their legacies that Alice, Melanie, and amanda are connecting to in their work fostering thriving Black agricultural systems.

We hope you took something away from these explorations of connection, resistance, and struggle – and we’d love to hear your thoughts about them. For the first time, we’re opening up our Substack chat, and hopefully, some of us will take the conversation there. If you’d like to chat with us about EARTH or FFJ in general, you just need to download the Substack app (messages are sent via the app, not email).

How to get started

1. Download the app by clicking this link or the button below. Chat is only on iOS for now, but chat is coming to the Android app soon.

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2. Open the app and tap the Chat icon. It looks like two bubbles in the bottom bar, and you’ll see a row for our chat inside.

3. That’s it! Jump into our thread to say hi, and if you have any issues, check out Substack’s FAQ.

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Next up we have CITY, coming to your inboxes in early May. Until then, we encourage you to browse our back catalogue of MILK, WAR, and SEX, and to stay tuned for our EARTH behind-the-scenes newsletter, which will be going out to paid subscribers next week. 

Finally, if you’re enjoying FFJ and able to financially support us, we’d be grateful if you could consider it. Paid subscribers get access to bonus content like our behind-the-scenes, and also audio versions of most written stories (usually read by the authors themselves!). This is a great way to enjoy FFJ if you prefer podcast formats or spend a lot of time on the move. Our project is entirely funded by paid subscribers and your support is, therefore, invaluable.

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Further reading:

“Race, Land, and the Law: Black Farmers and the Limits of a Politics of Recognition” (Brian Williams and Tyler McCreary, Black Food Matters: Racial Justice in the Wake of Food Justice)

“Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth” (Carol J. Adams (Anthology Editor), Lori Gruen (Anthology Editor))

Vittles Season 5: Food Producers and Production

“The rural nostalgia of Chinese cottagecore” (Barcalay Bram for Vittles, 3 April 2023)

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What does a farming conference have to do with feminist theory? Lucy Harding, Dora Taylor, and Hester van Hensbergen, facilitators of the Oxford Real Farming Conference (ORFC), explore the radical potential for an ecofeminist food system.  

By Lucy Harding, Dora Taylor, and Hester van Hensbergen

The current global food system is a stark expression of the domination, destruction, and short-sightedness wrought by patriarchy and globally deregulated capitalism. The violence of intensive, industrial-scale food production is acute. In the name of our food, we witness illegal land grabs, the destruction of vital biodiversity, the exploitation of workers, appalling conditions for livestock and animals, and corporate gatekeeping on the resources of food production, whether it be seeds, land, or water.  

But you know all of this. You’re here because you know this violence against life itself must be resisted. You know we must carve out hopeful space for a different food future.  

The Oxford Real Farming Conference (ORFC) is one such space. Launched as an alternative to the Oxford Farming Conference, which gathers agri-business representatives in Oxford in early January each year, ORFC brings together farmers, growers, activists, policymakers and researchers from around the world over the same days.  All are interested in transforming our food system through agroecology, regenerative agriculture, organic farming and indigenous food and farming systems. 

The 14th annual ORCF, held from January 4-6, 2023, counted a record number of in-person and online participants. As part of the conference organizing team, we were delighted to feature many sessions that focused on the intersections of feminism and agroecology. Below we offer some reflections on these intersections, and how they can inform the ways we move forward as a movement committed to food sovereignty and intersectional feminist perspectives and justice.

Recordings of the 2023 event can be viewed online in the ORFC archives. Here are some sessions that should not be missed!

The ORFC team’s must-watch list:

• A Care Income to Protect the Land, the People and the Natural World

• Intersectional Struggles for Justice in Food Systems

• Seeding Reparations: Making the UK’s Food Corporations Pay

FFJ’s top picks:

• Building a Jewish Land and Food Justice Movement in the UK – as a wandering Jew I was moved by how Sara Moon articulated the concept of Diasporism as a political orientation and practice which beckons us to be at home wherever we are, and calls us to fight to ensure that our home is just and equitable for everyone else, too. - Isabela

• Slow Cooked: An Unexpected Life in Food Politics with Marion Nestle and Raj Patel – I thoroughly enjoyed this convivial conversation between these two giants in the field of food systems change, especially Nestle’s reflections on the role of gender in shaping her career and the dynamics of working in academia while also being an active advocate for more equitable food systems. - Zoë

Care

Video above: Clem Sandison, Bridget Murphy, Sasha Georgiades, Sandra Salazar and Selma James in conversation on agroecology and feminism at ORFC 2023 in Oxford.

Agroecology — farming in harmony with nature — and feminism share much in common. Several sessions at this year’s ORFC highlighted these connections. In  Agroecology and Feminism: Transforming our society and our economy, facilitator and urban farmer Clem Sandison, emphasized how both movements seek to counter domination with liberation for diverse forms of life. Both hold an ethic of care for human and more-than-human life at their core.

Agroecology challenges the possibility of human mastery over a separate natural world, instead understanding that interspecies interdependence is key to building strong, supportive webs. Care work, which is essential to this interdependence, is seen as a strength, and uneven power dynamics give way to co-creation. As Selma James, panellist and coordinator of the Global Women’s Strike, explained, “Taking care of people and taking care of the soil and the natural world constitutes one essential job.”

At ORFC, we pursue our vision of food, land, and gender justice not only by facilitating the exchange of knowledge and skills but also through manifestations of care and considerations of accessibility. Providing bursaries, staffing a crèche, and serving nourishing food are ways that we work to create a space that meets the intersecting needs of the ORFC community and fosters intergenerational bonds. Just as feminism encourages a critical dissection of social reproduction, ORFC recognizes the essential role of interpersonal care in co-creating an equitable future food system. 

Justice

Another connection between feminism and agroecology is a shared commitment to justice. In a session on building a Jewish land justice movement, Samson Hart and Sara Moon spoke of the Yiddish concept of Doikayt, or “hereness”, which encourages Jewish people to cultivate connectedness to whichever lands they find themselves in and to stand alongside others in fights for justice in those lands, whatever they are. This concept demonstrates the humble and collaborative way in which we approach land and food justice at ORFC. 

The justice hub was launched in 2021 to foster solidarity and strengthen community care in the face of the COVID-19 crisis and the profound disconnection that it caused. This in-person space is programmed in collaboration with racial and land justice groups, Shared Assets and Land In Our Names, and facilitated panels and workshops during this year’s conference. It has proved a vital space for presenting radical research to the larger agroecological movement; in January 2023, the justice hub facilitated the launch of the Jumping Fences report on understanding and addressing the barriers to access to land for agroecological farming for Black people and people of colour in Britain.

The justice hub embraces intersectionality, welcoming anyone who is oppressed, discriminated against or marginalized within agriculture to feel empowered, connect with each other and share knowledge. It invites people with diverse perspectives to come together with a shared dedication to caring, listening and respecting others, and preparedness to pause, process and see what emerges. This approach is a blueprint for agroecology that pays as much attention to emotion and relationship as it does to method and practice. The justice hub exists in conversation with the rest of the conference.  It responds to the issues facing the agroecological movement and drives progress through the propagation of new ideas and values — such as the concept of Doikayt raised by Hart and Moon.

Relationality

Finally, this year’s ORFC helped us reflect on the importance of relationality to both feminism and agroecology. Relationality refers to our understanding that in our world, no person or thing exists in isolation — we are all connected. 

At ORFC, we aim to highlight that humans are as much a part of the food system as animals, plants, and insects, and how we relate to one another is intertwined with our relationship to the land holding us. Rooting our relational behaviour in the feminist principles of mutual aid, collaboration, and joy models an alternative to current systems of domination and extraction, and is therefore crucial to agroecology’s holistic vision of the future. 

Mama D Ujuaje beautifully expressed the interconnectivity of social and land relationships in a session about the use of composting to process trauma: "We compost to reconnect — to each other and to the Earth and all of its ecologies, to become younger siblings, to become again a child who acknowledges the eldership of the Earth." 

Looking ahead

At the 5th ORFC, founders Colin Tudge and Graham Harvey published a Manifesto for New Agriculture, grounded in the knowledge that “agriculture is the principal meeting place of humanity and the rest of nature.” As true now as it was then, “when we get farming right everything else we might aspire to becomes possible – from good food for all to global peace and the conservation of our fellow creatures.”

We are propelled by an ethic of care, commitment to justice, and recognition of relationality as we begin the process of planning ORFC 2024, a continuation of the agroecological movement and a celebration of the 15 years of connection and production that this space has fostered. Much of our mission for ORFC 2024 will be to challenge the myth of production that makes care work invisible. We know who feeds the world; it is the pastoralists, smallholders, and family- and women-led farmers who work as part of — and not against — nature. 

What we need now, in the run-up to the 15th ORFC, is not simply new agriculture, nor a return to an ancient pastoral ideal, but “hereness”. We must develop a deep affinity with each other and the more-than-human world. We must remember that there is no opt-out of our position of care in the delicate ecology of our earth, no matter how violently global systems of patriarchal capitalism insist on it. 

Lucy Harding, Dora Taylor, and Hester van Hensbergen are facilitators of the Oxford Real Farming Conference (ORFC). The 15th ORFC will be held in Oxford in January 2024 and the call for ideas and proposals is now open. Follow them on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook to stay up to date with ORFC 2024 opportunities and announcements. 

For a limited time, we’re offering 20% off paid subscriptions. In addition to keeping our project going, becoming a paid subscriber means you get access to audio versions of our written pieces (very often read by the authors themselves) as well as other bonus content.

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For now, we hope you’ll enjoy this podcast, where FFJ co-founding editor Zoë Johnson had the honour of speaking with Melanie Allen and amanda david about their work with the incredible Black Farmer Fund. They cover power in our food systems, the complexities of cultivating land in a capitalist settler-colonial context, and much more.

Listen now on Substack, your favourite podcast app, or the audio track below.

In the past century, 98 percent of Black agricultural landowners in the United States have been dispossessed of their holdings. They have lost altogether 12 million acres of agricultural land, with most of the losses occurring from the 1950s onwards. Between 1950 and 1975, more than half a million Black-owned farms across the country failed. According to an estimate by the Land Loss and Reparations Project, the dispossession of Black farmers in the American South alone has implied a loss of $250 to $350 billion in accumulated wealth and income for Black farmers and their communities. 

This systematic disconnection of Black people from the land occurred through a variety of means, which in the words of Atlantic writer Vann R. Newkirk II, “were sometimes legal, often coercive, in many cases legal and coercive, and occasionally violent”. Those of you who have read or listened to Dr. Alice Ragland’s piece “More Radical Than It May Seem”, which was published as part of this EARTH issue, will already know how these outcomes are the result of a long history of colonialism, slavery, and racist policy making. As she writes:

“Even after the end of sharecropping, the history of dispossessing African American farmers continued. Black farmers were excluded from land purchases by federal programs and policies; their legal protections related to intergenerational property transfer were limited; and it remained harder for Black farmers to access the capital needed to maintain their businesses because of discriminatory lending practices. Combined with the fact that most farm subsidies have continued to go to white farmers, this means that access to agriculture within many Black communities in the US is limited.”

According to an analysis by NPR, even as recently as 2022, only 36 percent of Black farmers who applied for direct loans from the US Department of Agriculture were approved, compared to 72 percent of white farmers who applied. This, despite the fact that direct loans are supposed to be the easiest type of USDA loan to acquire; they are meant for farmers who can't get credit elsewhere and can be used to buy land, and farming equipment or cover other operational costs needed to keep a business alive. 

Enter Black Farmer Fund.

Credits

This episode features writing and sound editing by Zoë Johson; research by Zoë Johnson & Isabela Vera; and original music by the Electric Muffin Research Kitchen.

Audio clips include Dr. Alice Ragland, from her recording of “More Radical Than It May Seem” from Feminist Food Journal; and Karen Washington, from the video “Community Wealth Building” by Black Farmer Fund.

Transcript

Full transcript of the podcast available here.

Shownotes

Learn more about Black Farmer Fund on their website, where you can also watch the powerful “Black Farmers Thriving” video series. For more information on investing, you can email invest@blackfarmerfund.com.

Check out amanda david’s initiative, Rootwork Herbals and read about the Jane Minor BIPOC Community Medicine Garden.

Further Readings

“The Great Land Robbery” (Vann R. Newkirk II, The Atlantic)

“Help Black Farmers, Who Know Hyperlocal Doesn’t Mean Fancy” (Tressie McMillan Cottom, The New York Times)

“Race, Land, and the Law: Black Farmers and the Limits of a Politics of Recognition” (Brian Williams and Tyler McCreary, Black Food Matters: Racial Justice in the Wake of Food Justice)

“The USDA Is Set To Give Black Farmers Debt Relief. They've Heard That One Before” (Emma Hurt, NPR)

By Alice Ragland | Paid subscribers can listen to a version of this piece, read by Alice, on our podcast.

I am the great-great-granddaughter of slaves. But for a long time, I didn’t know it.

At least, not in definitive terms. It wasn’t until I was in my mid-twenties that my mom confirmed just how close the histories of slavery and sharecropping (an oppressive system of agricultural labour exchange for little to no money) were in my family. 

“I think your great-grandparents lived on some kind of farm, and they didn’t really get paid,” she told me one day as we flipped through a few photos of my grandfather’s mom, who we called “Ma”. I had been asking her questions about my mother’s grandparents in an attempt to piece together some family history, wondering how we even got to Cleveland if our family was from the South. For some reason, I was not expecting sharecropping to be part of the conversation that day. Like many Black American households, nobody in my family spoke directly about our shockingly recent personal history of slavery — or the sharecropping that followed it. But despite no one saying it out loud, that history hung around us, like lingering fog. 

At this point, I had done extensive research and writing on American chattel slavery for my Ph.D. and was already teaching Black history courses at the college level. I felt ridiculous for having delved so deeply into this issue while not knowing the details of my own family history, and after hearing about my great-grandparents, I wanted to know more. But yearn as I might to learn about those who came before me, the roots of my family tree remained invisible: a trunk floating halfway in the air with no palpable foundation. 

I know that my ancestors were brought to America during the Transatlantic Slave Trade sometime between 1526 and 1867. Along with around 12.5 million other Africans, they were ripped from the lands which had sustained them — both physically and spiritually — packed onto ships by European colonizers and forced to make the dangerous, often deadly, journey to North, South, or Central America, or the Caribbean. But I will never know the names of my countless family members who spent their lives enslaved. I have no record of them prior to my great-grandparents. I know I have generations of relatives who each had unique desires, dreams, fears, and hopes, and yet, I don’t have a single piece of paper to verify any aspect of their existence. Whenever I think about this, I get the frustrated feeling you get when you realize something has been stolen from you. I grieve for the loss of knowledge, wisdom, traditions, and stories. 

But I am finding ways to re-establish a connection to these unknown ancestors, mainly through herbalism and growing my own food. These practices were central to the resistance against enslavement and enacted by Black women in particular. Reclaiming them allows me to connect to my severed family tree and to fight ongoing systemic racism in the United States.

The power of plants

Agriculture was the principal driver of the slave-based economy. Africans’ forced labour was needed to sustain and grow the emerging agricultural markets in the “New World”. African women, in particular, were considered desirable field hands because of their strong knowledge of cultivating subtropical plants on the African continent. It was centuries of their uncompensated labour that ultimately transformed the agricultural sector in the Americas into the booming global industry we know today, generating tremendous wealth for plantation-owning white families and governments.

Agriculture was the rationale for controlling and dehumanizing enslaved people, but it was also used as a means of resistance. To supplement the dire rations given to them, many enslaved people cultivated gardens or “patches” near the slave quarters — which were usually located in the woods or on the periphery of the plantation, outside of the direct guise of the master. Black women often grew medicinal herbs in their patches or gathered them from the surrounding forests. West African slaves brought herbal wisdom with them to the New World. Through contact with Indigenous Americans, they cultivated their knowledge of medicinal plants native to the Americas which they combined with their own and passed down orally through generations. 

Gardening and growing medicinal herbs was more radical than it may seem. The maintenance of these garden plots required additional labour beyond their already excruciatingly long work days; but the gardens were among the few spaces Black communities, and Black women in particular, could control. Here, they cultivated the plants of their African homelands, such as okra, peanuts, and melons, which, in addition to nutrition, provided a sense of comfort, familiarity, and healing in otherwise horrendous conditions. They strengthened family and community solidarity through the sharing of produce. Often, the gardens and yards of the slave quarters included symbols and spiritual elements from African cultures, such as hanging blue glass bottles on tree limbs to ward off evil spirits. Gardens thereby became secret sites for maintaining the cultures that the slave system was attempting to strip away. 

Black women also used plant medicine to exercise agency over their own bodies as midwives and traditional healers. Sexual violence against enslaved women was rampant. They were routinely raped and impregnated by their owners.1 Herbalism gave enslaved Black women some tiny semblance of control over their bodies, allowing them to use herbs to help with pregnancy, birth control, or abortion when they lacked access to other forms of medical treatment.

Because of the power of plants — and the potential for plants to be used to poison the slave masters — certain localities, such as Virginia, passed laws as early as 1748 that prohibited enslaved people from administering medicines without their owners’ approval. They could face death if caught breaking this rule. Even though the consequences were high, Black women continued to practice herbalism and maintain spiritual connections to medicinal plants. However, these laws played a role in hindering their ability to pass down herbal knowledge to new generations, as did the constant movement resulting from being bought and sold to different plantations, and the fact that most colonies forbade slaves from learning how to read and write.  

Reclaiming my heritage

It is ironic to think that my ancestors’ forced labour was foundational to our agricultural system, and yet, because of slavery, I have been severed from their stories, traditions, and rich knowledge of tending farms and cultivating gardens. 

After the formal abolition of slavery, my ancestors, including my great-grandparents, became sharecroppers. Like many other former slaves, they likely lived on the exact same plantations that they and/or their families had worked on while enslaved. In a sharecropper’s arrangement, workers “rented” part of the land as tenants in exchange for a share of the crop yield. Because of laws in many states, including Alabama and Georgia, where my great grandparents were based before they made the journey north to Cleveland, prevented Black people from owning land — or made it significantly harder for them to own land — for many, sharecropping was one of the only options for survival. It was not an easy life. Plantation owners frequently held their workers in perpetual debt and even inflicted physical violence, at times. African American sharecroppers were treated even worse than poor white people in the same positions. Their freedom continued to be stymied in ways reminiscent of slavery; for example, they needed to obtain written permission from their plantation owner in order to work on another plantation. They were also excluded from sharecroppers’ unions. 

Even after the end of sharecropping, the history of dispossessing African American farmers continued. Black farmers were excluded from land purchases by federal programs and policies; their legal protections related to intergenerational property transfer were limited; and it remained harder for Black farmers to access the capital needed to maintain their businesses because of discriminatory lending practices. Combined with the fact that most farm subsidies have continued to go to white farmers, this means that access to agriculture within many Black communities in the US is limited. Today, less than 1.5% of farmers in the US are Black. And although gender-disaggregated data is not available, we can assume even fewer are women. 

Right now, in Columbus, I live in a “high need” area, meaning a part of the city with significant poverty. It is predominantly working-class people of colour who live here. Although a nearby Save-A-Lot store prevents my neighbourhood from officially being a “food desert”,2 the produce available there is expensive and is often old, sometimes even spoiling on the shelves. (Currently, more than half of Cleveland residents and a quarter of Cuyahoga County, the Northeast Ohio county that includes Cleveland and its nearly 60 suburbs, towns, and municipalities residents live in what are considered to be food deserts.) This has serious implications for the health and well-being of the people in these communities.

Urban agriculture is often touted as a potential solution to these problems, which are structural in nature and relate to systemic disinvestment by governments and corporations in marginalized neighbourhoods. Afro and Indigenous-owned urban farms, like Soul Fire Farm in New York, receive attention in headlines and documentaries, but despite the legacies of Black farming and resistance (and the fact that people of colour are more likely to live in so-called food deserts), the face of the contemporary urban farmer remains largely white. 

When I moved back to Cleveland for a year after completing my undergraduate and master’s degrees, I worked for a nonprofit community development organization, where one of my projects was to build a database of all of the urban farmers in the area. Although the neighbourhood was populated mainly with working-class people of colour, only two out of the 10 urban farmers I identified were Black. In a country where Black people are nearly three times as likely to be living in poverty, it is white people who have the access to land, meaning the wealth required to obtain land and the connections needed to build an urban farm from the ground up. No matter that the success of this country’s land came on the backs of Black people. Black people who do farm are met with suspicion: the two Black farmers from my census, a sister and a brother, had turned a rented vacant lot into a hyper-accessible farm host to a plethora of community activities, only to see their land access swiftly rescinded when a neighbour complained about the need to “clean up” the property. 

In the face of these oppressive forces, I’m more determined than ever to shape my own future through the act of growing food and herbs. These days, I grow carrots, celery, greens, rainbow chard, tomatoes, basil, sage, broccoli, and onions on my own small plot in the backyard. I find comfort in using the bounty to make healthy vegetable stews. I usually make up the recipes as I go along. With the help of books such as African Holistic Health by Llaila Afrika, I’ve been teaching myself about herbalism.

When I cultivate sage and basil from my garden, I’m reminded of the generations of women before me who did the same. The medicines that prior generations of Black women made gave them a sense of freedom, and helped them to combat illnesses and injuries that resulted from the unlivable conditions they were forced to endure and their lack of access to formal healthcare. As healthcare inequality, medical racism, and the toxic stress of living in a racist society continue to take their toll on Black people’s health, I see making anti-inflammatory and stress-relieving teas from the basil and sage in my garden as a small act of reclamation within an unjust system. As I think back to the ways my ancestors might have exchanged knowledge of these herbs with indigenous people — who were also dispossessed of their connection to the land — I reflect on the complexities of cultivating land in a settler-colonial context. I’ve started presenting workshops for youth groups and various community organizations about backyard farming, cooking produce from the garden, and the relationship between food and health. Soon, I’ll start my own program dedicated to accessible education about health, food, and herbal medicine. 

Thinking about the role that agriculture played in my ancestors’ past and about the barriers being faced by my communities to land and food access in the present, gives me a sense of purpose as I dig my hands into the soil working to reclaim the knowledge and connection that were stolen. By growing my own food and teaching others to do so, I am engaging in a subtle act of resistance and enacting agency within an environment that has attempted to deny me, my communities, and my ancestors fresh, healthy food and the land on which to grow it. And I ensure that the history, labour, innovation, resistance, and humanity of those who came before me will not be forgotten. 

Alice Ragland is a professor, community educator, and writer. She’s also an aspiring herbalist and has been studying various forms of healing intergenerational trauma since finishing her Ph.D. 

By Francis Northwood

Drive up from Los Angeles to Sonoma via interstate five: land, land and more of it, feeding most of the state and much of the country.  The farms and farmers of this region feed metropolitan restaurants like the infamous Chez Panisse. Opened in 1971 by chef and author Alice Waters, Chez Panisse was designed to provide its patrons with an “everyday agrarian experience”. A fantasy, as no reasonable person would understand this experience as earnest. A dinner costs US$175 per person excluding beverages, tax, and service and it might end with a deliberately modest bowl of fruit. 

Irony aside, the restaurant delivered an important genre. In her book, Smart Casual: The Transformation of Gourmet Restaurant Style in America, art historian Alison Pearlman describes how, beginning with Chez Panisse, restaurants began to blur the differences between fine and casual dining, producing a “smart casual” style. Chez Panisse reflects neither just haute nor just hippie. Its first floor was for French fine dining, but so that Waters’ “new establishment [could] be all things for all people,” she made the second floor a cheaper (but still pricey) café meant to evoke an Italian trattoria. This postmodern style is inextricably Californian, catering to both dressed-down tech workers and the old-money elite.

French sociologist Jean Baudrillard famously described Los Angeles as the postmodern city — a city “without space, without dimension”— qualities equally applicable to the hyper-digitized Bay Area of today. Only in such a spaceless place could cuisine be both wholly imported (Chez Panisse’s menu is not rooted in the long history of California, the physical place) and at the same time be described as the way “people have been eating since the beginning of time”. In such a place, where the land had been torn from its original inhabitants and repackaged as wild, it’s easy to see how cuisine could grow without the restrictions of tradition or the demands of history. 

But we’ve seen this happen even in places with more coherent culinary histories than California. Proponents of the Slow Food movement in Italy, a movement that, like California cuisine, promotes local food, have been known to grasp onto idealized versions of their traditions that gloss over the histories of struggle — along the axes of class, race, and gender — that have shaped the way people eat. The translucent cured pork fat lardo di Colonnata, “once a common element in local diets and an essential source of calorific energy for impoverished quarry workers,” was a seminal part of the Slow Food Movement’s growth in Italy, which “reinvented and repackaged [the] exotic item for gourmet consumption,” though the proletariat communities who snacked on it didn’t benefit from its commodification. 

More austere themes of sanitized tradition appear in New Nordic cuisine (of Noma 1.0 fame) and its minimalist look, which many have come to associate with Scandinavian culture. The cuisine’s founding manifesto proclaims its wish “to express the purity, freshness, simplicity, and ethics we wish to associate with our region”; it’s a sensibility that validates itself both in small plates of simple food, but also beyond the kitchen. These expressions of “simplicity” and “purity” are vague and reek of Nordic tropes. It fits the idea of what consumers expect of Nordic cultural production, making unspoken judgements of who inhabits a body and belongs to a culture worthy of these descriptors. The mostly male chefs who peddle it reject the practices of the aggressive, hypermasculine chef, but also take pains to distance themselves from traditionally “women-like” ways of everyday cooking. 

Cuisine in California has undergone similar reinvention and repackaging. But the culinary infrastructure of California is so new that it resists static interpretations or efforts to gatekeep. Is this Californian? Is that? — these questions feel unanswerable, meaningless. This makes it easy for the cuisine to be sold as radical. And thus California cuisine has been marketed as food that somehow feeds and “nourishes” (which Waters believes her food does, in a spiritual sense). A hodgepodge of other cuisines — French, Italian, Mexican, and more — California cuisine “simplifies” what it comes into contact with; in other words, it rids itself of what its interlocutors see as impure. Just as Michael Pollan once called for a shift from commercialized organic farming to “grass farming”, a purer and more artisanal practice, the current food movement, backed by wealthy patrons, is self-purifying. Organic is giving way to “regenerative” or “biodynamic,” local to hyperlocal, heirloom to heritage, and the farmers’ market to the CSA. 

Its incessant attempts to purify itself manifest in a problem less obvious than that of New Nordic Cuisine or Slow Food in Italy. Insofar as it lacks a relevant tradition to draw from, California cuisines call for us to care about things like the “soil,” “earth,” or “nature”. The nebulousness of these terms is deliberate — a tool of business to disguise California cuisine’s most harmful practices. 

Modern fine-dining culture tends to emphasize the ingredient over technique. Under the reign of cuisine classique, elaborate cooking operations were the hallmark of good cooking, placing significant value on kitchen labour. But as the food culture zeitgeist shifted towards how we grow our food, much fine dining has become an exercise in how simple ingredients are, or how elegantly they’re cultivated. This means that a larger portion of the labour that goes into a “good” or luxury meal now happens on the farm instead of in the kitchen. 

Who does the work? Mas Masumoto, the renowned grower of his namesake peach, which Chez Panisse catapulted to stardom, writes that his delicate heirloom peaches need to be picked by many human hands; in an op-ed titled “The better peach,” he calls for immigration reform because only immigrant labour will fill his fields. (Why? Unanswered.) “One fruit requires manual labour,” he writes, “an intensive operation of workers constantly in my fields.” 

If only we cared for the labour as much as we do the fruit. Masumoto credits “the food world” — described by NPR as “a world of people who really cared about flavour and how their food was grown” — with saving his collapsing heirloom peach farm. But care for “how food is grown” tends to lapse into mythical reverence of the farmer and the undervaluing of the farmworker. In the California context, we lionize and commercialize the commitment of male farmers like Mas Masumoto or Chez Panisse purveyor Bob Cannard to the land — they have become the pallbearers of agrarianism to consumers. The sensibility of the ruling class — in this case, the once-granola crowd of California gourmands, foodies, yuppies, and other cosmopolitan residents of the state — is shot through these characters. Like New Nordic or regional Italian, Californian cuisine presents an idealized vision of purity. And behind the cleanliness and freshness and simplicity, we hide the labouring bodies of colour who produce the few foods we think of as good and all the other foods that we don’t.

Three-quarters of Californian farmworkers are estimated to be undocumented. Women, representing a third of all farmworkers and so rarely farmers themselves, face a “rape crisis” in California. The relevance of these facts to Californian cuisine may seem tenuous — after all, boutique farms have sold themselves as an alternative, so the wrongdoings of megafarms would seem to only further justify the California food movement. Mainstream alternative food discourse holds that we vote with our forks; taking our business elsewhere signals the type of future we want to see. But critic Mark Grief notes how the endless purification of the organic cannon requires “the patronage of a few buyers at the very top of the income distribution.” The whole operation shrinks, as do the politics. Boutique farms like Cannard’s or Masumoto’s don’t hire as many people as the mega-farm. That’s the point: scaled-down farming. They are an exercise in craft for craft’s sake, as luxury products often are. 

But what comes with this territory is a particular brand of consumer politics that further isolates thousands upon thousands of farmworkers and low-income people already in crisis. At best, California’s food movement and its associated fine dining institutions leave most farmworkers politically unaffected; at worst, the growing industry of boutique farms isolates the farm workers of the megafarms because they tend to put the spotlight on farmers and their college-educated farm interns, those with an “interest” in farming, not the farmworkers who more literally feed our country. 

I’m not here advocating for a modern future full of mega-farms that feed everyone and employ everyone — that doesn’t taste good and perpetuates the injustice of the status quo. But the contradiction that forms with luxury items — having luxury items in an unequal world relies upon inequality — needs to be solved somehow, and California cuisine is a non-answer. Waters may have claimed that “how we eat is how we live,” that food is political, and this type of cuisine is directed at making change. But there are limits to balancing “countercultural values” and “refined” taste. Waters hints at this in her autobiography, where she coyly remarks of a past lover that “to David, everything was political; to me, too, but I wasn’t about to give up the chocolate mousse.” 

The idea, therefore, that there might be something to California cuisine outside of pleasure is naïve. It is a near-pop sensibility — a pleasurable way of living within the system. Carlo Petrini, the founder of the Slow Food Movement, described slow food as “a homeopathic medicine,” to be “taken daily to remind ourselves that it is we who decide the rhythm of life we want to lead, rather than having these rhythms imposed on us from outside.” Unwittingly, it sounds like an ad for Prozac; funny, because, like Prozac, this kind of approach to food and eating is an understandable response to modern life. We don’t want simple for simple’s sake — at the bare minimum, we want to taste our way out of our anxieties. 

Perhaps the anesthetic is beginning to wear off. Chez Panisse’s fruit bowl, once the stuff of “legend”, has become cliché. “Too simple,” writes the San Francisco Chronicle restaurant critic in their latest review. And if the fruit bowl is passé, the summer drink of 2022 was nothing, and nobody wants caviar at a time like this. Personally, I’m finding that taste itself, whether in me (biochemically) or in the food (its cultivation, its terroir), is beginning to dull. I throw back tomato sandwiches and tomato-centred BLTs, trendy foods starring the heirloom tomato, the poster produce of a refined green sensibility. But they all taste the same  — yellow, orange, big, medium, from the supermarket, the farmer’s market, anywhere in the country. I’ve considered whether or not this means that I’m depressed.

 The greater question that remains is how we should eat. It seems obvious — we eat to “nourish” ourselves, for pleasure, and at the bare minimum, to keep ourselves alive. But the question seems practically unanswerable as long as the status quo (capitalism, late capitalism, neoliberalism, whichever -ism you prefer) remains. Right now, for many, food is one of two things: bare subsistence, a limit case on what can keep one alive; or a luxury, an art object. California cuisine was a dream of melding these two things, a promise to provide not just bare subsistence, but everyday art from which life could be drawn. It remains just that — a dream. 

Francis Northwood is a freelance writer from California and based in New York City. 

The English-language version of this piece was originally published online in Feminist Food Journal’s EARTH issue on February 14, 2023. Read it here. Listen to it here.

En México, el trabajo y conocimiento de las tortilleras, — mujeres que hacen y venden tortillas de manera tradicional — son fundamentales para conservar la agrobiodiversidad y las prácticas alimentarias tradicionales. Al reflexionar sobre el uso de la leña para la transformación de los alimentos en el campo mexicano, encontramos el particular vínculo entre las relaciones de género, la construcción de soberanía alimentaria y el uso de recursos energéticos para la transformación del maíz en alimento. 

Por María Villalpando | Traducido por Ignacio Ahijado

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¿Qué hace que una tortilla sea buena?

La respuesta a esta pregunta la podemos encontrar en las regiones rurales de México, donde las tortilleras — como se conoce a las mujeres que se dedican a hacer y vender tortillas elaboradas de manera tradicional — hacen magia con el maíz. Empiezan calentando los granos de maíz con agua y cal para después remojar y dejar reposar la mezcla hasta que los granos se suavicen. Este proceso dura varias horas y se conoce como nixtamalización. Después, los granos de maíz se muelen usando un «metate», una piedra de moler especial, e inicia el proceso de «amasar». Cuando la masa está lista, la tortillera la redondea en pequeñas bolitas para poner sobre el «comal», un disco de barro o metal liso que se pone sobre un fuego abierto, y les da vueltas hasta que se cuecen a la perfección. 

El trabajo dedicado a la producción de tortillas — así como el conocimiento y experiencia específica de las tortilleras — es el pilar de los sistemas alimentarios locales en las comunidades campesinas de México.

Estas mujeres no son cocineras, sino artesanas: pueden distinguir entre las diferentes variedades de maíz con sólo mirar el color y la textura de las tortillas, y saber fácilmente qué variedad de maíz criollo — azul, morado, rojo, amarillo — es el más adecuado para la comida que se va a preparar. En el campo, se sabe que las «buenas» tortillas son aquellas hechas a mano por tortilleras; solo hay que probar una de las muestras que estas mujeres ofrecen en el mercado — calientitas, blandas y rematadas con una pizca de sal — para estar convencido de ello.

El trabajo de las tortilleras es crucial para la conservación del maíz criollo en México, el hogar ancestral de lo que ya se ha convertido en el mayor cultivo del planeta. En un mundo donde muchas de las formas tradicionales de agricultura se han abandonado en favor de los monocultivos y de variedades de alto rendimiento, las comunidades campesinas en México han logrado resistir el embate del maíz proveniente de Estados Unidos que ha inundado el mercado en las últimas dos décadas. Muchos continúan cultivando distintas variedades de maíz criollo, valoradas tanto por su valor nutricional como simbólico, y el cultivo y consumo de estas es tanto un medio de subsistencia, como una forma de vida. Por ello, el conocimiento de las mujeres tortilleras sobre las técnicas tradicionales de transformación del maíz en alimento y los saberes que el hacer tortillas implica es vital para el fortalecimiento de la soberanía alimentaria. Es gracias a la conservación de dichas prácticas que las comunidades campesinas son capaces de determinar su propio sistema alimentario. 

Sin embargo, el conocimiento y las habilidades particulares de las tortilleras no se limitan a la comida en sí;  el fuego utilizado para hacer tortillas también es un elemento clave. En el campo mexicano, el uso de la leña y las actividades de transformación de alimentos no pueden analizarse de forma separada. Para más de 28 millones de personas en México, incluyendo las tortilleras, la madera sigue siendo un combustible principal o secundario. Por ejemplo, las tortilleras utilizan más de 25 kg de leña al día y pasan alrededor de ocho horas cocinando sobre fuegos abiertos para completar el proceso de transformación del maíz y cocción de la tortilla.

La obtención de leña es un proceso largo; las mujeres pueden pasar desde treinta minutos hasta tres horas al día recolectándola en los alrededores de sus hogares. Además, el uso de fuegos abiertos expone a las tortilleras al humo y a contaminantes tóxicos que pueden causar daño ocular y respiratorio, enfermedades pulmonares e incluso cáncer. Esta exposición dentro de la cocina es una de las principales causas de enfermedad y muerte prematura en el México rural.

Hoy, las definiciones hegemónicas de pobreza energética equiparan el uso de la leña con la privación material. La transición del uso de leña a otras fuentes de energía entendidas como más modernas — como el gas natural licuado (GNL) — es considerado más «desarrollado» y como una forma de progreso a la que se debería aspirar. Sin embargo, en las zonas rurales de México, el acceso y uso del GNL ha sido históricamente escaso y costoso y, si bien este ha aumentado en las últimas dos décadas, aún no ha reemplazado por completo el uso de leña. Esto se debe a que, para las mujeres del campo mexicano, la decisión de seguir usando leña para hacer tortillas no es únicamente una cuestión de precio y disponibilidad.

El uso de leña para hacer tortillas forma parte central de las tradiciones culinarias , la experiencia y los saberes específicos de las mujeres tortilleras. «Saben mejor», dicen muchas mujeres sobre sus tortillas en comparación con otras hechas en máquina. Además, la forma de cultivo y la transformación del maíz en tortillas es una fuente de orgullo para muchas mujeres rurales mexicanas. Por ello, asumir que las tortilleras cambiarán la leña por combustibles más «modernos» ignora la importancia de sus prácticas y tradiciones alimentarias. También desatiende la necesidad de garantizar que las mujeres tengan control sobre el acceso y gestión de los recursos naturales con los que trabajan, idealmente en condiciones saludables y ambientalmente sostenibles.

La importancia de la leña para las prácticas alimentarias de las tortilleras sugiere que, si pensamos en la soberanía alimentaria, debemos ir más allá del derecho de las comunidades a definir y controlar sus propios sistemas agrícolas y acceder a alimentos saludables, seguros y culturalmente aceptables. La conceptualización de la soberanía alimentaria debe también considerar el derecho a definir y controlar las fuentes de energía utilizadas para la transformación y la producción de alimentos. Es imposible pensar en soberanía alimentaria sin considerar la necesidad de soberanía energética en el campo mexicano. Asimismo, el uso y acceso a fuentes de energía seguras y sustentables en el contexto rural requiere de una perspectiva de género para ir más allá de una transición energética y pensar en la justicia energética, donde hombres y mujeres tienen acceso equitativo a los recursos y capacidades necesarias para conservar y enaltecer sus formas de alimentación. 

En el estado de Michoacán, el grupo Red Tsiri nació de la necesidad de apoyar el acceso de las mujeres tortilleras a fuentes de energía limpia y a revalorizar las prácticas tradicionales de cocción del maíz, que a su vez contribuyen a la conservación de los maíces criollos. En 2009, este colectivo liderado por mujeres tortilleras colaboró con el Grupo Interdisciplinario de Tecnología Rural Apropiada (GIRA) para desarrollar la Estufa Patsari. Se trata de una estufa ahorradora de leña que optimiza el uso del calor, reduce la emisión de gases de efecto invernadero y disminuye la exposición al humo de la cocina. En la lengua Purépecha, patsari hace referencia a la antigua práctica de cubrir las brasas del fuego con tierra para mantenerlas vivas y poder usarlas para encender un fuego al día siguiente. La estufa Patsari no solo permite a las mujeres reducir el tiempo dedicado a la recolección de leña, sino que también reduce su exposición al monóxido de carbono y otros contaminantes del humo, mientras mantiene las dimensiones y funciones de las estufas tradicionales al aire libre.

El diseño ha resultado popular; hasta ahora, más de 250,000 mujeres rurales en Michoacán lo han adoptado. La fabricación de la estufa Patsari, o de estufas similares como la estufa Lorena en el sur de México, ha sido liderada en gran parte por las mismas comunidades y se ha expandido orgánicamente más allá de Michoacán. Es difícil rastrear cuántas estufas ahorradoras de leña están en uso actualmente en todo el país, pero este tipo de estufa está sirviendo como una solución al complejo problema del uso de la leña en zonas rurales. Con ella, las mujeres tortilleras pueden mantener sus prácticas alimentarias al mismo tiempo que protegen su salud y su tiempo, y hacen uso sostenible de los recursos naturales necesarios para las labores que practican.

Sabemos que la comida es cultura, pero la energía usada para producirla también lo es. La centralidad del maíz y las tortillas en la vida rural de México revela las complejas relaciones entre el uso de la leña y la soberanía alimentaria. Cuando pensamos en cómo preservar las prácticas alimentarias, debemos también pensar en cómo apoyar las formas tradicionales de producción y transformación agrícola. Necesitamos desarrollar alternativas energéticas que sean seguras y eficientes, pero también sensibles a las prácticas culturales y de género. Impulsadas por la leña, las mujeres tortilleras son y seguirán siendo las guardianas del maíz criollo, así como de sus beneficios nutricionales y colorida diversidad. Sin ellas no hay maíz ni país.

María Villalpando es una estudiante de doctorado mexicana en la Universidad de California, Berkeley. María está interesada en las complejidades de los espacios rurales de México y entiende la escritura y la investigación como prácticas socialmente comprometidas.

Ignacio Ahijado es traductor, mediador intercultural y gestor de comunicación en Nested CoLab. Actualmente vive en Lisboa, enclave atlántico desde donde busca construir puentes entre personas, culturas y territorios.

By María Villalpando | Paid subscribers can listen to a version of this piece read by Maria on our podcast.

This piece has also been translated into Spanish by Ignacio Ahijado. You can read it here.

Read the Spanish version

What makes a good tortilla?

One answer to this question can be found in Mexico’s countryside, where tortilleras — a name given to women devoted to the making and selling of tortillas through traditional methods — turn maize into magic. Tortilleras start by heating grains of maize with lime and water and then rinsing them several times in an hours-long process known as nixtamalization. Then, the maize kernels are grounded using a metate  — a special grinding stone — and mixed into dough. Once the dough is ready, the women flatten it by hand into small circles over a comal, a smooth, flat griddle set over an open fire, flipping and turning it until cooked to perfection. 

If the work that goes into making tortillas is the backbone of local food systems in peasant communities in Mexico, then women’s knowledge is the beating heart. These women are not cooks, but artisans: they can distinguish between different varieties of maize simply by looking at the colour and texture of the tortilla, and know readily which variety of native maize — blue, purple, red, yellow — is best suited for what type of cooking process. In the countryside, everyone knows that “good” tortillas are those made artisanally by tortilleras; one needs only to taste one of the samples the women often hand out at the market, warm, soft, and crowned with a pinch of salt, to be convinced of that.

The work of tortilleras is crucial for the conservation of heirloom maize in Mexico, the ancestral home of what has now become the world’s largest food crop. In a world where many traditional forms of agriculture have been neglected in favour of monocultures and high-yielding varieties, smallholder and peasant communities in Mexico have managed to weather the flooding of US-grown maize into the market over recent decades. Many continue to grow heirloom maize, cherished for both its nutritional and symbolic value, and rely on these varieties to sustain their livelihoods. Women’s knowledge of traditional maize processing techniques and culinary customs is central to this enactment of food sovereignty, making it possible for these peasant communities to determine the shape and scale of their food system.

The knowledge and cooking skills of tortilleras are not limited to the food itself. The fuel used for the fires that cook their tortillas is also an important factor in their practices. In Mexico’s countryside, the use of fuelwood — wood that is harvested from forests and used to stoke the fires needed to transform maize into tortillas — and food transformation activities cannot be analyzed separately. For more than 28 million people in Mexico, tortilleras included, wood remains a main or secondary fuel. Tortillera women burn more than 25kg of fuelwood over the course of the eight hours per day they spend cooking over open fires.

Its use comes with drawbacks. Fuelwood gathering is time-consuming; women can spend anywhere from thirty minutes up to three hours per day foraging for it. The use of open fires also exposes women to kitchen smoke and toxic pollutants which can cause respiratory and eye damage, lung disease, and even cancer. This exposure is one of the leading causes of illness and premature death in rural Mexico.

For these reasons, mainstream definitions of energy poverty equate the use of firewood to material deprivation. Moving from wood as a source of energy to more modern sources, like liquified petroleum natural gas (LPG), is therefore regarded by many as forward-moving development — progress that should be embraced. In rural areas, LPG has historically been scarce and expensive. Although access to and use of LPG has increased in the past two decades, it has not totally replaced the use of fuelwood. This is because, for the women in Mexico’s countryside, the decision to continue using fuelwood to make tortillas is about more than just price and availability.

The process of using fuelwood to make tortillas is central to cultural traditions, embodied practices, and ways of knowing. “They taste better,” many women will say about their tortillas, in comparison to others cooked in non-traditional ways. They’re proud of the way their maize is grown, cooked and transformed into nutritious food. To assume, then, that tortilleras will swap firewood for more “modern” fuels neglects the importance of their foodways. It also neglects the need to ensure that women have control over the access and management of the natural resources that they work with, ideally in healthy and environmentally sound ways.  

The importance of fuelwood to tortilleras’ food practices suggests that in thinking about food sovereignty, we should be looking beyond the right of people to define and control their own agricultural systems and access foods that are healthy, safe, and culturally acceptable. Our conceptualizations of food sovereignty should also include consideration of people’s right to define and control the energy sources that go into food production — fuel sovereignty, if you will. We also need to consider how the use of energy in relation to food is deeply gendered. This directly relates to energy justice — which applies the principles of justice to the energy transition — and indirectly to discussions about agrobiodiversity, which is maintained in part by time-honoured ways of growing and eating. 

In the Mexican state of Michoacan, the grassroots group Red Tsiri was born out of the need to support tortillera women’s access to clean sources of energy and to revalue traditional maize cooking practices, which in turn contribute to the conservation of heirloom maize. In 2009, this women-led collective, in collaboration with the Interdisciplinary Group for the Appropriation of Rural Eco-technologies (GIRA in Spanish), developed the Patsari Stove, an improved cookstove that retains heat efficiently while helping to protect both the health of people and the environment. (In the Purépecha language, Patsari refers to the ancient practice of covering embers from the fire with dirt to keep them alive so they can be used to generate a fire the next day.) The Patsari Stove not only allows women to reduce the time they spend gathering wood, but it also reduces their exposure to carbon monoxide and smoke pollutants while maintaining the dimensions and functions of traditional open-air stoves. 

The design has proved popular; so far, more than 250,000 rural women in Michoacan have adopted it. The making of the Patsari stove, or similar stoves like the Lorena Stove used in Southern Mexico, has been largely taken up by communities themselves and expanded organically beyond Michoacan. It’s difficult to track how many are actually in use across the country, but this type of stove is serving as one solution to the complex issue of fuelwood use. With them, Mexican women are able to maintain their traditional foodways while also protecting their health and their time, and making more sustainable use of the natural resources needed to fuel their cooking. 

We know that food is culture. But the energy used to produce food is culture, too. The centrality of maize and tortillas to life in Mexico’s countryside reveals the complex relationships between fuelwood use and food sovereignty. When we think about how to preserve foodways, we must think about how to support traditional ways of agricultural production. We need to develop fuel alternatives that are safe and efficient, but also sensitive to gender and cultural practices. Powered by fuelwood, tortilleras remain the stewardesses of native maize, allowing communities to benefit from its nutritional benefits and colourful diversity. Sin ellas no hay maíz ni país — without them, no corn nor country.

María Villalpando is a Mexican Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley. She is interested in the complexities of rural spaces in Mexico and believes in approaching writing and research as socially committed practices.

By McKenzie Schwark | Paid subscribers can listen to a version of this piece read by McKenzie on our podcast.

When I came out, before I knew anything about acrylic nails, Fletcher’s ex-girlfriend’s new girlfriend, or U-Hauls, I already knew about the longing. There is an endless amount of longing in lesbian lore. It seems lesbians are wont to long. That’s why they keep making four-hour-long movies where two women pine for each other somewhere by the sea, and no one goes down on anyone until maybe the last fifteen minutes.

Love isn’t all we long for, though. There also seems to be a distinct lesbian longing to go back to the land. Before coming out, I picked up a copy of Wild Mares: My Lesbian Back-To-The-Land Life by Dianna Hunter, a memoir that chronicles Hunter’s experience growing up as a feminist lesbian in Minot — the same town in North Dakota where I spent most of my childhood Thanksgivings — and recounts her experiences living on various farms and communes run by fellow queer people.

The farms and communes across which Hunter roamed were part of the “womyn’s land movement”, a movement made up largely of queer women who established rural feminist utopias as “places to escape the patriarchy”. At the time, life for single women was difficult — it was common to be denied credit cards, bank loans, and purchases like cars and houses — and queer women had to keep their sexuality hush-hush. Some felt alienated by both the growing women’s rights and gay rights movements, which they perceived as either homophobic or misogynistic.

So they set about creating their own space. At its peak, the movement had established about 150 communities across the United States, and their goals were ambitious. As Hunter describes: 

They [women’s land collectives] focused mostly on political reasons for living with women on the land, reasons like empowering ourselves; healing from the physical and psychological injuries inflicted on us by patriarchy; living in ways that didn’t harm the environment; bonding with sisters; saying no to the war machine; and experimenting with romance and sex without ownership, male dominance, or routine female submission. 

Women in these communities lived largely off the land, growing their own food, milking their own cows, and fixing their own pipes. The communities were important spaces in which lesbian women were able to link up, both romantically and platonically, into networks that scarcely existed before. Many functioned as cooperatives, and the absence of the male gaze meant that “women often comfortably lounged around the premises in various states of undress”. Things weren’t perfect — harsh winter winds chafed community members dry and the women occasionally broke each other’s hearts — but these places were safe.

As I read Wild Mares, I found myself daydreaming of this kind of life. Did these lesbian dairy farmers have it all figured out? My friends and I had always joked about pooling our savings to buy a little property and a couple of cows, in hopes of finding some kind of better life, one where we didn’t spend most of our time hunched over our laptops, agonizing over the exclamation points in emails that didn’t matter, just to make enough money to rent apartments with ant problems that our landlords blamed us for, and to escape on weekends to bars and concerts where there was always a chance of a mass murderer turning up with a gun. It was impossible not to dream of something different. Plus, we already looked the part. Heavy lace-up boots, beanies, blunt-cut bangs, bandanas tied like ascots, flannels tucked into high-waisted jeans overlaid with denim jackets — if I’d scrolled through the photos of women in these collectives on Instagram instead of seeing them in the pages of Wild Mares, I could’ve easily mistaken them for my generational kin.

But even if we decided to give it all up for a life on the land, the opportunities to do so would be slim. Nowadays, many of these rural communities, like the Huntington Open Women’s Land (HOWL) in Vermont and Alapine in Alabama, are dying out — their members are ageing, being taken from the land by knee and hip replacements, and no one is coming to replace them. The reasons for this are myriad. Starting a decade or so ago, HOWL began to accept anyone who identifies as a woman, but other spaces have remained trans-exclusive, putting off younger members from joining. With today’s economic pressures, fewer people can afford to give it all up for a life of manual labour on the land (which is one of the reasons these communities were primarily founded by middle-class white women in the first place). It’s also become somewhat easier to move through the world as a queer, femme-presenting person, making this kind of dramatic sequestering from society less necessary and less appealing. 

It turned out, though, that I didn’t have to look much further than my phone screen to go back to the land. During the onset of the pandemic in 2020, you couldn’t be even slightly queer-coded on TikTok without being absolutely flooded with content labelled “cottagecore”. For months, my “For You” page was awash with queer, feminine people living in perfect little woodland cottages.

@aroacegenderfluidlesbianlet's make the Homophobes uncomfy pt 9 (WlW Cottagecore Lesbian edition) #fyp #foryoupage #lgbtcommunity #lgbt #lesbian #lesbianromance #wlw

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There are millions of videos and views under hashtags like #cottagecorequeer, #cottagecorelesbian, and #offgridgays. They showcase mostly white, mostly femme-presenting people lying in the grass together, sipping tea, baking cakes, and caring for animals. The motifs are dreamy: delicate floral patterns, rosy cheeks, instrumental music playing in the background. It’s a very different image than the at-times rugged reality Hunter describes in Wild Mares, but it seemed like living through a global pandemic while trapped in a capitalistic hellscape had young people, especially young queer people, dreaming of an entirely different kind of life. A select few made that dream a reality, whisking their wives off to greener pastures, while the rest of us curated a fantasy world online. 

@idiotgingerlesbianI rly want this 🥺 #cottagecore #forestcore #wlw #cottagecorelesbian #fairies #dreamlife #lesbian

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Today’s cottagecore relies more heavily on aesthetic than action. Whereas the lesbian separatists took their fantasies of utopia and tried to make them real, cottagecore lesbians mostly let their fantasies play out online. This online world-building is both a nod to the lesbian separatist movement and indicative of a new generation of queer people. In a Youtube video titled Why is Cottagecore so Gay? user Rowan Ellis says, “For queer and sapphic women, [cottagecore] allows them to imagine a space without homophobia, fear and judgement, that doesn’t feel like a banishment but instead a specifically curated paradise.” 

We need this curated paradise because, in many ways, things still suck. While society is more progressive than it was during the heydays of the womyn’s land movement, queer rights are newly under unprecedented attack. Throughout 2022, legislators filed over 200 anti-LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer and/or questioning) bills in the United States. Many of those bills specifically targeted young trans people. Alabama, Florida, and Texas have all introduced legislation that criminalizes gender-affirming care for young people. “Don’t Say Gay” bills have been proposed in more than a dozen states, and the precedent set by the overturning of Roe v. Wade may eventually threaten the right to same-sex marriage. The Supreme Court is currently poised to side with a Colorado-based web designer who is suing in advance of opening her business for the right to refuse to create websites for gay weddings. All of this has been enough that an independent UN human rights expert recently warned that the rights of LGBTQ people are being “deliberately undermined by some state governments in the United States”.

Along with rural communities, other traditionally lesbian spaces are quickly disappearing. In 2021, only about 21 lesbian bars remained in the United States, a steep decline from the over 200 lesbian bars that existed by the 1980s. Some reasons for this are positive, like the potential for queer people to connect through dating apps. But others are more insidious, like gentrification, transphobia, racism, and persistent gender wage gaps. (In The Feminist City, geographer Leslie Kern quotes a DJ interviewed on the disappearance of lesbian spaces in Toronto: “It’s just a fact that two women together are going to have less income, disposable income, to drop at a club, to keep it open. And that’s white women we’re talking about, that’s not even people of colour.”)

Places that still exist are under increased threat. Hate crimes against gay people continue to rise, and communal spaces like gay bars and drag shows are targets for homophobic hate crimes. On November 20th, 2022, five people were killed at Club Q in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The night before the club was set to host a drag brunch for a trans day of remembrance, a man with an assault rifle opened fire on its patrons.

“This is our only safe space here in the Springs,” a patron told a local reporter outside the club on Sunday morning. “What are we gonna do now? Where are we gonna go?”

Where are we gonna go? The cost of living in cities, which have been historically more welcoming to queer people, is astronomically high. Many parts of the world are increasingly unsafe. Rural utopias are mostly out, for the aforementioned reasons of inaccessibility and infeasibility. The forces of oppression feel impenetrable, except maybe in our online fantasies where we can live out our days picking flowers in gauzy dresses while our beautiful partners are somewhere in the forest chopping wood to put on a pot of tea. 

Fantasies play an important role in letting us dream of the world we want, and shaping the way we move to create it. But merely passively absorbing those fantasies can anesthetize us, in the same way that dipping out from society to form our own rural utopias can prevent us from agitating for wider change. (In 2019, a resident of the women’s Alpine community told The New York Times, “I don’t want to fight anymore. I’m over going to marches and all that. My solution was to walk away from the patriarchy and not be in those situations, because you’re just banging your head. Why keep doing that?”). We can’t live in TikTok, and we can’t settle for the largely white femme fantasies that TikTok presents us with, the same way we can’t assume that moving en masse back to the land is realistic or possible for much of our community.

We should, however, still be advocating for ourselves, and for the land. Climate change and queer liberation are deeply intertwined. Adverse weather events — heatwaves, hurricanes, cold snaps, floods — disproportionately impact vulnerable communities, particularly the unhoused. In the US, studies have shown that between 20 to 45 percent of houseless youth identify as LGBTQ, at least two to four times higher than the estimated percentage of all youth who identify as LGBTQ. Among young adults, LGBTQ people have nearly twice the risk of being houseless than their straight-identifying counterparts. Beyond these statistics, the patriarchal structures that underpin our capitalist, extractivist economies are the very same that pass bills to control our bodies and restrict how we move through the world. 

As the spaces we’ve carved out for ourselves die out or become unsafe, I like to believe it is at least partly because we refuse to be corralled away from society. If we aren’t safe in our most sacred of spaces, then the fight becomes making everywhere safe and accessible, making every place one where young queer people can live out the lives they’ve imagined. We need to keep fighting with the same ambition as Hunter and her associates: death to the patriarchy, no to environmental wreckage, and goodbye to the war machine. Only we need to do it in a space greater than a 50-acre farm, and a six-inch phone screen.

McKenzie Schwark is a writer living in Chicago whose work focuses on reproductive health, chronic illness, and health as a feminist issue. For more, visit mckenzieschwark.com or find her at @schwarkattack.

Rich and diverse like healthy soil, EARTH brings talented voices together on indigenous food sovereignty, queer utopias, Californian cuisine, energy justice, Black agriculture, and restoring ancestral connections. It will unfurl slowly over the next three months. We invite you to get in touch with us about the small worlds it will bring to life — what they made you think about, and how they made you feel. Expect to hear from us again at the end of the season to take stock of what’s sprouted.

To kick the issue off, we have ḥačatakma c̓awaak (Everything is interconnected), a new episode of our podcast where editor Isabela sits down with Charlotte Coté, Professor in the Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Washington and author of A Drum in One Hand, A Sockeye in the Other: Stories of Indigenous Food Sovereignty from the Northwest Coast. 

They discuss the role of gender in Indigenous food sovereignty in both the past and present, the risks of “culinary imperialism” in blanket calls to veganize our diets, how social media enables Indigenous peoples to tell their own stories about food, and the ways that going back to the land with a “colonized” mindset can lead to missed opportunities for true connection.

Listen now on our podcast or in the audio track below.

It’s hard to believe it’s been almost a year since we brought you our first issue, MILK. EARTH is the last of the first four issues we initially conceptualized and it’s such a joy to be putting it out there. Pitches for our fifth issue, CITY, will be opening very soon, so keep an eye out.

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New to FFJ? Check out our previous issues MILK, WAR, and SEX. 

ḥačatakma c̓awaak (Everything is interconnected)

Credits

This episode features research and writing by Isabela Vera; sound editing by Isabela Vera & Zoë Johnson; and original music by the Electric Muffin Research Kitchen.

Transcript

Full transcript of the podcast available here.

Shownotes and further resources

Coté, C (2022). A Drum in One Hand, a Sockeye in the Other: Stories of Indigenous Food Sovereignty from the Northwest Coast. University of Washington Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv289dw4p

Coté, C. (2022, Oct 17). ḥačatakma c̓awaak (everything is interconnected). Indigenous food sovereignty, health, resilience and sustainability. Talk given at President’s Dream Colloquium on Indigenous Peoples and Local Community Perspectives on Sustainability and Resilience. Simon Fraser University, Harbour Centre, Vancouver.

Coté, C. (2022, Oct 6). “c̓uumaʕas. The River that Runs through Us”. Talk given at the Oregon Humanities Center, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon.

Coté, C. (2022, Sep 28). UO Today interview: Charlotte Coté (Tseshaht First Nation), Amer. Indian Studies, University of Washington. University of Oregon.

Coté, C. (2022, March 16). Exploring Indigenous Food Sovereignty with Dr. Charlotte Coté. MOHAI History Café. Download program transcript: https://adobe.ly/3PGcnPs

Coté, C. (2022, March 3). Charlotte Coté with Dana Arviso: Stories of Indigenous Food Sovereignty from the NW Town Hall Seattle.

Coté, C. (2019). hishuk’ish tsawalk—Everything is One: Revitalizing Place-Based Indigenous Food Systems through the Enactment of Food Sovereignty. Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development, 9(A), 37–48. https://doi.org/10.5304/jafscd.2019.09A.003

Nast, C. (2020, November 8). This Inuk Throat Singer is Bringing Cultural Pride to TikTok. Vogue. https://www.vogue.com/article/shina-novalinga-indigenous-inuk-throat-singer-tiktok