A note from the editors: It is hard to believe that it was almost two years ago that we first published this powerful conversation with the feminist activists behind a virtual cooking class organized to raise funds for Feminist Workshop, an NGO based in Lviv, shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine. We’re not sure we would have believed you if you had told us then that the war in Ukraine would still be raging more than two years on. We also would not have wanted to believe you if you had told us just how much the scale of global conflicts would have grown in the last two years. We’ve thought about this conversation often as we’ve watched the horrors unfolding in Gaza over the last 150+ days. As one of our interviewees, Fenya, said:
I’m walking around here in Brussels and in London and seeing everyone with little banners for “welcome Ukrainians”. But then when we have these ongoing crises in Afghanistan and we have the US and Western powers actively aggravating that. And people needing to leave and people being unsafe we don’t allow them in, we allow them to drown at sea. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t support Ukrainians, but it means that we need to be a little more reflective on whose lives are worth saving.
Although it can be painful to watch and observe how little has changed since early 2022, we believe, as Guardian columnist Arwa Mahdawi says, that bearing witness is a feminist act. Like in all conflicts, food has been central to this war: its weaponization by Israel, as it deliberately starves the population of Gaza to death, and its link to atrocities, as people waiting for aid were slaughtered in what is now grimly known as the “Flour Massacre”. We hope revisiting this podcast will offer you new insights into food, war, feminist organizing, and maybe provide a faint glimmer of hope — that for all the world’s violence, we can still find generative, creative ways of working together that don’t bolster the military machine.
This podcast was written and produced by Zoë Johnson with original music by the Electric Muffin Research Kitchen.
SHOWNOTES
Transcript
Read the show transcript here.
Resources
Learn more about Feminist Workshop and donate to their feminist and queer mutual aid in Lviv via GoFundMe;
Check the list of feminist, LGBTQI, disability justice groups in Ukraine and donate to them directly;
Read the Solidarity Statement and Call for Action; and
Follow Sonaksha Iyengar, who did the beautiful graphics for Cooking Up Resistance.
Featured Audio Clips
Woman at war by Benedikt Erlingsson (2018): Ukrainian folk singers
Feminist Workshop: “Sex, Freedom, Money: What more do feminists want? (“СЕКС, СВОБОДА, ГРОШІ: ЧОГО ЩЕ ХОЧУТЬ ФЕМІНІСТКИ?”)
NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday: “Ukrainian women are volunteering to fight, continuing a tradition”
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