Happy Birthday to FFJ
We're turning three — and celebrating with a cocktail
It’s hard for us to believe it, but Feminist Food Journal turns three today. Well, formally three — while our first issue, MILK, launched on February 15, 2022, we’d been hard at work behind the scenes since July 2021, when we started building our first website and thinking about our business model.
It simultaneously feels like time has flown by, but also like we’ve covered so much ground. Longtime readers will have this roll-call down pat by now, but our back catalogue consists of:
MILK | WAR | SEX | EARTH | CITY | SEA
MEAT | BODY | and, soon, CELEBRATE.
We’re so proud of this work and encourage you to browse through them whenever time allows. And while we’re pained by the current state of global affairs, we feel more committed to our mission of sharing intersectional and global feminist perspectives on food and culture than ever. As Natalie Adler quoted David Lynch in a recent Lux newsletter: Fix your hearts or die. It’s go time.
We promise to take that intentionality into our fourth year as a publication. And because we know that celebration is a radical act, to celebrate our third birthday (and the release of our call for pitches for our ninth issue, CELEBRATE), we’re re-sharing a short essay and original cocktail recipe with our premium subscribers.
Created by our in-house FFJ bartender to honour the life and work of bell hooks, who passed away in 2021 shortly before our magazine launched, it’s the perfect recipe for a Friday toast, whether you’re celebrating the power of romantic or platonic love post-Valentine’s Day or even just the fact that you’ve survived another week.
Wounds of Passion: a cocktail honouring the life and writing of bell hooks
Women and alcohol. Associations between the two abound, and Sophie Lewis’ excellent review of Girly Drinks: A World History of Women and Alcohol by Mallory O’Meara for the London Review of Books offers a double-layered analysis of their fraught, passionate, and pleasurable relationship. From the effective campaign to paint entrepreneurial beer-brewing women as witches to the radical subversion hidden in the stereotype of the drunken 1950s housewife, questions of if, why, how, and for whom women drink have been policed and contested for thousands of years. These questions are, of course, framed by wider systems of racism and misogyny and answered with resistance, control, and exploitation.