Nourishing Resistance: Stories of Food, Protest, and Mutual Aid

From the cooks who have quietly fed rebels and revolutionaries to
the collective kitchens set up after hurricanes and floods, food has
long played a crucial role in resistance, protest, and mutual aid.
Until very recently, food-based work—steadfast and not particularly
flashy—slipped under the radar or was centered on celebrity chefs and
well-funded nonprofits. Adding to a growing constellation of
conversations that push against this narrative, Nourishing Resistance centers the role of everyday people in acts of culinary solidarity.

Twenty-three
contributors—cooks, farmers, writers, organizers, academics, and
dreamers—write on queer potlucks, BIPOC-centered farms and gardens,
rebel ancestors, disability justice, indigenous food sovereignty, and
the fight against toxic diet culture, among many other topics. They
recount bowls of biryani at a Delhi protest, fricasé de conejo on a
Puerto Rican farm, pay-as-you-want dishes in a collectively-run Hong
Kong restaurant, and lemon cake cooked in a New Jersey disaster relief
kitchen. They chronicle the communal kitchens and food distribution
programs that emerged in Buenos Aires and New York City in the wake of
COVID-19, which caused surging food insecurity worldwide. They look to
the past, revealing how “Bella Ciao” was composed by striking women rice
workers, and the future, speculating on postcapitalist worlds that
include both high-tech collective farms and herbs gathered beside
highways.
Through essays, articles, poems, and stories, Nourishing Resistance argues that food is a central, intrinsic part of global struggles for autonomy and collective liberation.