Feminist Food Stories – Details, episodes & analysis

Can we square our love of animals with our inability to stop eating their body parts? In this short audio essay, Feminist Food Journal editor Isabela chronicles her evolving relationship with vegetarianism and stubborn love of offal to unpack what meat means to our sense of self.

This podcast features writing and sound editing by Isabela Bonnevera and original music by the Electric Muffin Research Kitchen.

This is an audio reading of Meat: The Four Futures, first published last week by TABLE researcher Tamsin Blaxter as part of our MEAT issue. Tamsin breaks down the gendered dimensions of different future visions on meat, weaving together strands of feminist and postcolonial history to examine why certain futures resonate differently with different folks, and what direction techno-meat is heading in.

Is there social, political, economic, and cultural war being waged on fat bodies? Scholars have argued that fat stigma is contributing to the social and physiological harm of fat people and that this stigma is in fact a central driver of morbidity and mortality at a population level. For FFJ’s second issue, WAR, our editor Zoë brings you another episode of Feminist Food Stories featuring her conversation with two scholars working at the intersection of food studies and fat studies. They discuss the war on “obesity”, its roots, its manifestations in the food movement, and their hopes for fat food justice in the future.

This podcast features writing, research, and sound editing by Zoë Johnson and original music from the Electric Muffin Research Kitchen. You can also listen to it on Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts.

SHOWNOTES

Transcript

Read the show transcript here.

Further reading

* Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C. (Ashanté M. Reese)

* Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness (Da’Shaun L. Harrison)

* “Can't Stomach It: How Michael Pollan et al. Made Me Want to Eat Cheetos” (Julie Guthman)

* “The Fallacy of Eating The Way Your Great-Grandmother Ate” (Virginia Sole-Smith)

* Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia (Sabrina Strings)

* Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement (Monica White)

* “It’s Not a Food Desert, It’s Food Apartheid” (Karen Washington)

* Modern Food, Moral Food: Self-Control, Science, and the Rise of Modern American Eating in the Early Twentieth Century (Helen Zoe Veit)

* “Public Health’s Power-Neutral, Fatphobic Obsession with ‘Food Deserts’”(Marquisele Mercedes)

More activists and scholars to read, learn about, and follow:

* Cat Pausé

* Erica Zurawski

* Lindley Ashline

* Psyche Williams-Forson

* Ragen Chastain

Paris, 1942. A group of women storm a grocery store on the Rue de Buci to seize the sardines on sale that day and distribute them to a hungry crowd. A scuffle ensues, shots ring out — and at the end, two policemen are dead. Today, the Rue de Buci event is remembered as an act of women’s resistance during wartime. But is that all there is to it?

In this episode of Feminist Food Stories, founding editor Isabela sits down with Paula Schwarz, the Lois B. Watson Professor Emerita of French & Francophone Studies at Middlebury College and author of Today Sardines Are Not For Sale: A Street Protest in Occupied Paris, to discuss the intersections of wartime food politics and gender, and why and how resistance is remembered in different ways.

This podcast features writing and research by Isabela Vera; sound editing by Isabela Bonnevera & Zoë Johnson, and original music by the Electric Muffin Research Kitchen. You can also listen to it on Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts.

SHOWNOTES

Transcript

Read the show transcript here.

Further reading

Boyle, E. (n.d.). Wartime Memories: Louise Mardon. <https://www.eleanorboyle.com/wartime-memories/louise-mardon>

Brown, T. (2022). The Breadwinners: The Women Whose Hunger Drove the French Revolution. Feminist Food Journal.

Hunt, K. (2010). The Politics of Food and Women's Neighborhood Activism in First World War Britain. International Labor and Working-Class History, 77(1), 8-26. doi:10.1017/S0147547909990226

Schwartz, P. (1999). The politics of food and gender in occupied Paris. Modern & Contemporary France, 7:1, 35-45, DOI: 10.1080/09639489908456468.

Schwartz, P. (2020). Today Sardines Are Not For Sale: A Street Protest in Occupied Paris. Oxford University Press. (If you’re interested in reading it, you can order it using the discount code here!)

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”

This is the audio version of ‘The Childless Mothers’, a piece written by Lauren Gitlin for our MILK issue and read here by the author herself. Lauren is a former food scholar, journalist, and wine professional who currently owns and operates Villa Villekulla Farm, a goat microdairy in Barnard, Vermont.

Passover is upon us, and what better time to reflect on a Jewish mother's love for her children? Our MILK highlight of the week is editor Isabela's audio story, A Treasure for My Daughter, where she explores growth and sacrifice through the lens of her mom's non-kosher kitchen (and fluffy matzo balls). Dig in, eat on, and celebrate the eternal complexity that is food and family.

This podcast features writing and research by Isabela Vera; sound editing by Isabela Vera & Zoë Johnson, and original music by the Electric Muffin Research Kitchen. You can also listen to it on Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts.

SHOWNOTES

Transcript

Read the show transcript here.

Photos

For reference, here is my mom and I enjoying French delights on a trip to Paris that we took in March 2005, lieu of my having a bat mitzvah.

Further readings

Milk is a highly contested beverage, but not always for the reasons you might think. In this episode of Feminist Food Stories (and as part of our MILK issue), editor Isabela looks at how milk is used as a tool of racial and gender oppression by both extremist alt-right forces and discreet government policies. For part of this story, she sits down with Alice Yao, an associate professor with the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, to discuss Yao’s work on the links between milk consumption and Western imperialism.

This podcast features writing and research by Isabela Vera; sound editing by Isabela Bonnevera & Zoë Johnson, and original music by the Electric Muffin Research Kitchen. You can also listen to it on Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts.

SHOWNOTES

Transcript

Read the transcript of the show here.

Further readings

Freeman, A. (2013). The Unbearable Whiteness of Milk: Food Oppression and the USDA. UC Irvine Law Review, Vol. 3, p. 1251, 2013. <https://ssrn.com/abstract=2338749>

Stănescu, V. (2018). ‘White Power Milk’: Milk, Dietary Racism, and the ‘Alt-Right’, Animal Studies Journal, 7(2), 103-128. <https://ro.uow.edu.au/asj/vol7/iss2/7>

The Economist. (2015, March 28). No use crying: The ability to digest milk may explain how Europe got rich. <https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2015/03/28/no-use-crying>

Through a conversation with his father, Amirio Freeman digs into the dynamics of grilling as a queer Black man. Drawing on references to literature investigating meat’s link to masculinity, the piece offers an intimate dialogue between family members about how the act of bringing meat to a flame reflects Black food traditions in need of stewards, impositions of gender performance, and food as a vehicle for queer possibilities.

In this podcast, Troy Bright, a self-taught orca researcher, shares his knowledge of orcas’ rich matriarchal societies, their unique food cultures, and how our human food systems are putting this way of life at risk. This includes over-extraction of salmon, a key food source for orcas which Indigenous nations managed sustainably for thousands of years before colonization; Isabela dig into the links between the historical treatment of Indigenous women in the salmon canning industry and high levels of food insecurity among Indigenous and racialized women in British Colombia today.