FFJ Recommends: The Summer Edition
Books, podcasts, and recipes for your lazy-day pleasure
Happy August! We moved this week’s newsletter a few days later than our usual Tuesday slot to accommodate some summer fun — Zoë hiking in Baden Württemberg and Isabela at Whole a few hours away from Berlin. Isabela has been back in the German capital for the last few weeks to escape the Barcelona heat and it’s been wonderful to share some laughs, dinners, and dog snuggles together again (we had been apart since saying goodbye in Manila back in April after our YSEALI magazine writing workshop).
We have a few updates to share…
First: Thanks to everyone who supported our summer merch drop!
Our merch store will be closing in a just few hours — if there’s still something on your list, order now to avoid disappointment.
Second: We’re concluding our MEAT issue!
We will soon send our usual Letter from the Editors with our takeaways and thoughts. In the meantime, we’d love to hear yours: what did you like about and learn from MEAT? Which pieces stood out? What common themes came up? Leave us a comment or email us at hello@feministfoodjournal.com.
Third: We’ve put together a summer edition of FFJ Recommends!
While we meditate on MEAT, we wanted to share a summer edition of FFJ Recommends. It’s been a while — seven months in fact — since we last sent one and we have half of 2024’s worth of reading, listening, recipes, and more to share.
But before we start…
Some of this newsletter is available for everyone, but we have a special treat for our premium subscribers at the end. Zoë’s partner recently published his first book, and to celebrate, he hosted a magnificent party serving up five original summer cocktail recipes illustrated on a printed drink list by Zoë. We want to let you in on the ingredients so you can try them out yourself! We’re also going to share the cake recipe Isabela recently used for her fifth wedding anniversary party in Berlin…it’s probably becoming quite clear that we’ll seize any reason to throw a party.
Annual subscriptions are very affordable ($2.50 a month!) and we cannot run FFJ without the support of our readers. Please consider supporting us if you can.
This summer, FFJ recommends…
FICTION
Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder by Asako Yuzuki — the vivid descriptions of food will leave you drooling (Isabela ate plain rice with butter and soy sauce every day for a week after reading it).
Butter Honey Pig Bread by Francesca Ekwuyasi — a moving tale of food, queerness, familial love and redemption across Nigeria, Canada, and Europe.
The Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang — it’s a page-turner! Set in a dystopian future where smog has made the cultivation of food impossible in most of the world, this novel tells the story of a chef hired to work for an “elite research community” experimenting with the de-extinction of edible plant and animals. The Guardian calls it “a startling prose hymn to food and sex, love and violence”.
NON-FICTION
Longthroat Memoirs: Soups, Sex and Nigerian Taste Buds by Yemisi Aribisala — Zoë gave this to Isabela for Christmas and
serendipitously covered it in her book club earlier this year. A razor-sharp collection of essays on food and culture in Nigeria that doesn’t hand information to readers on a silver platter but rather requires one to engage, dig deeper, and navigate through potential culinary unfamiliarity.Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture: A Radical View of Western Civilization and Some of the People It Has Tried to Destroy by Arthur Evans — Isabela stumbled across an anarchist reprint of this seminal 1978 book at a book sale and found the historical connections between paganism, sex positivity, and queerness and their repression by Christian-industrial forces stunningly illuminating.
Transforming School Food Politics around the World, edited by Jennifer Gaddis and Sarah Robert — this edited volume looks at how school food programs can be a vehicle for community care and a policy tool for advancing education, health, justice, food sovereignty, and sustainability. Excitingly, we will soon be featuring a longer interview with the editors to share their main findings! In the meantime, you can check out the accompanying curriculum guide or read the digital version of the book (which is open-access).
The $16 Taco: Contested Geographies of Food, Ethnicity, and Gentrification by Pascale Joassart-Marcelli — recommended to Isabela by an anonymous reviewer of her journal article forthcoming in Agriculture and Human Values. This book presents a wealth of empirical work on what the author terms “the contested food geographies of immigrants and people of colour” whose lives and labour form the backbone of urban food economies that they are increasingly excluded from.
The Menopause Manifesto by Dr Jen Gunter — who Isabela, Zoë, and Zoë’s mum saw speak when we were all back in Vancouver earlier this year. Although we’re not nearing our menopause transition just yet, this was the first of Dr Gunter’s books to become available at the library — and it turned out to be a fascinating read for people of all ages.
PODCASTS
Around the Table: Exploring the relationship between food, belonging, spirituality and social justice through dinner dialogues — a community-engaged research project and nine-part podcast series featuring conversations with community leaders from across Turtle Island about shared meals, dialogue, spirituality, and social justice. If you’re curious about the growing trend towards curating intentional dinner dialogues (in simple terms, bringing people together to talk over food!), this is an excellent listen.
Novara FM: London’s Endless Appetite w/ Johnathan Nunn and Amardeep Sign Dhillon — a captivating discussion about the history of food and eating in London and the book London Feeds Itself, with its editor Jonathan Nunn (of Vittles fame) and a contributor, Amardeep Singh Dhillon.
Fairwork Podcast Episode 007: Gorillas — a shameless plug for the podcast made by the team at Zoë’s new job. All the episodes are great but this one discusses work at the grocery delivery company, Gorillas.
RECIPES
Finally, as promised…