From the cooks who have fed rebels and revolutionaries to the collective kitchens set up after ecological disasters, food has long played a crucial role in resistance, protest, and mutual aid. Nourishing Resistance centers these everyday acts of culinary solidarity. Twenty-three contributors—cooks, farmers, writers, organizers, academics, and dreamers—write on queer potlucks, 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, and pay-as-you-want dishes in a collectively run Hong Kong restaurant. They chronicle the food distribution programs that emerged in Buenos Aires and New York City in the wake of COVID-19. They look to the past, revealing how women rice workers composed the song “Bella Ciao,” 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.

Praise

“This collection of essays offers invaluable frameworks and inspirational models on how to get food out of capitalist markets and into the hands and stomachs of all. They fiercely demonstrate how the harvesting, growing, preparing, cooking, sharing, and eating of food has shaped and reshaped our cultures, created the social conditions for conviviality, and helped to break the seclusion and alienation that racist capitalist patriarchies organize. A must read for all who dream of keeping practices of commoning alive.”
—Silvia Federici, author of Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons

“A thoughtfully assembled, refreshingly global collection of radical voices who urge us to reimagine the meaning of the phrase ‘food is political.’”
—Mayukh Sen, author of Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America

“Prepare to be nourished by this book. In these essays, contributors share personal and collective stories of grassroots food activism from around the world. From community kitchens to queer potlucks to critical analyses of public space, diet culture, and property—you’ll witness how they reimagine food beyond the food enterprise status quo. Each essay is intimate. As the authors revisit what community, sovereignty, radical, and other concepts mean, they address concepts that are often taken for granted in food-related activism and scholarship. While lifting up the significance of food in social movements, they make fresh connections between movements whose stories are often told separately. There are no prescriptive ‘solutions’ here, thank goodness. This collection is a reminder that kitchen sink food activism is taking place everywhere and is happening now. By sharing their stories, the authors invite us to reconsider our commitments, our assumptions, and what we think is possible.”
—Naya Jones, assistant professor, University of California Santa Cruz