Nice to meet you

Hello, or hi again, from FFJ

We have a lot of new faces here this week — hello! We’re thrilled to have you. After much eleventh-hour flip-flopping (one of our specialties here at Feminist Food Journal HQ), we’ve decided to a break from our regularly scheduled programming to briefly (re)introduce ourselves.

Feminist Food Journal (FFJ) is an online magazine and podcast edited by Isabela Vera and Zoë Johnson. We’re two Vancouverites who met in Berlin and started FFJ back in February 2022 as a way of indulging our shared commitment to good storytelling and exploring the critical links between food and gender.

Here we are — Isabela (left) and Zoë (right). Long-time subscribers will recognize that we have a very small pool of acceptable founder photos to pull from, hence why we keep using this one.

If you’re here, you’ve probably thought about the fact that food influences so many areas of our lives, and relates to many systems of power and oppression. With FFJ, we aim to shed light on these areas of food and culture by spotlighting lesser-heard voices and untold stories that are global in scope. We hope these stories will make you think differently about both the remarkable and the mundane in the world around you.

With this goal in mind, we’ve worked with writers from all over the world, and so far published six issues: MILK, WAR, SEX, EARTH, CITY, and currently, SEA.

Essays and podcasts are published every second Tuesday, and we send a final Letter from the Editors to wrap up each issue. We kicked SEA off two weeks ago with Tender Seas, a moving piece on nurturing, loss, and gender roles in Japan by Megumi Koiwai. If you become a paid subscriber, you can gain access to a reading of the piece by Megumi herself (we do this with most of our essays; paid subscribers also get access to paywalled bonus content). Please consider becoming a paid subscriber if you’re able, as this support keeps FFJ going!

Beyond the first few waves of SEA, our archive is bursting, and whether you’ve been here for six hours or six months, we encourage you to have a look through and catch up on anything you’ve missed. It’s easy to go through issue by issue at the top of our Substack homepage. Otherwise, we’ve taken the liberty of curating a few of our (self-proclaimed) greatest hits below.

MILK

Isabela’s top pick: Milking Bodies to Make a Nation

Zoë’s top pick: The Childless Mothers

Note: We recently put our MILK issue into conversation with a Milk series by Sourced Journeys and Wellcome Collection Stories in Sourced’s newsletter, here! We’ll send this out in a few days.

WAR

Isabela’s top pick: House of Meat

Zoë’s top pick: Chicken, Chips, and Teargas

SEX

Isabela’s top pick: Be the Boar

Zoë’s top pick: An Oyster’s Burden

EARTH

Isabela’s top pick: The Broken Promise of California Cuisine

Zoë’s top pick: Sin ellas no hay maíz ni país (which is also available in Spanish)

CITY

Isabela’s top pick: Respectable Lives and Transgressive Tastes

Zoë’s top pick: Bitter Oranges

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In between issues, we’ve spoken about FFJ on podcasts like Super Smash Hoes and Cha Kula; connected with incredible food writers, activists, and wine professionals, and gone from having no idea if anyone would even read this thing to having nearly 2,000 of you here with us now. We received such kind and thoughtful feedback in our last subscriber survey, which has given us lots of new ideas on how to engage our community.

Readers also tell us that they love our illustrations (done in-house by Zoë), which won a Zelda Award from our friends at Anti-Heroine Media late last year. We’re very shortly going to be launching a merch store where some of these illustrations will be printed on all things food and fashion. (Our previous holiday merch sales have been very successful, if having a small mass of people buy a tote bag that shows a lemon being fingered counts as a success.)

Thanks for reading — and sorry to those who know us already. We’ll be back next week with new SEA content. We have so many exciting essays and audio pieces coming up this season and we can’t wait to hear what you think. We’d love for you to drop us a comment here on Substack when you have any questions or feedback. Otherwise, you can reach us anytime at hello@feministfoodjournal.com.

See you next week!