Reclaiming Culture Through Food Sovereignty

Issue No. 6: Food, Nutrition, and Access in Our Communities
Words - Cheyenne Diaz
Photograph - cara elise taylor

As a person with Afro-Caribbean and Japanese roots, I grew up loving the “strange” foods that my dad cooked meals with and that my baasan (grandmother) kept stored in the house. I was scarfing down jars of seaweed long before it became a health trend in the U.S. and I always cherished the days my dad made plátanos maduros fritos.

At first, I just liked them because I grew up with them. But I realized in my teenage years that my dad didn’t just make platanos or sandwiches cubanos because he grew up with them (he didn’t); he made them because it was also a ritual he used to strengthen our connection to our Cuban and Dominican ancestors. Cooking, eating, and connecting over food was as much about reclaiming our culture as it was about our individual bodily needs. 

This is also true outside of my family. Food not only nourishes our bodies but cultural foods act as a source of identity, self-sufficiency, and income for many marginalized communities. Go back far enough and you’ll probably find that the foods that have been maligned as “gross,” “strange,” “uncivilized,” “childish,” “messy,” or “smelly” are actually the carriers of your ancestors’ wisdom and sovereignty, the ability they had to govern and define themselves.

For example, Black people in the U.S. cultivated watermelons on their own land, sold watermelons in the markets, and ate watermelons in the public square after Emancipation. This turned the watermelon into a symbol of Black liberation and prosperity, threatening the racial order. Historian William R. Black shares a story in The Atlantic that encapsulates this:

“One white family in Houston was devastated when their nanny Clara left their household shortly after her emancipation in 1865. Henry Evans, a young white boy to whom Clara had likely been a second mother, cried for days after she left. But when he bumped into her on the street one day, he rejected her attempt to make peace. When Clara offered him some watermelon, Henry told her that “he would not eat what free negroes ate.”

As Black points out in his article, the racist trope of Black Americans being “excessively fond of watermelon emerged for a specific historical reason and served a specific political purpose.” This stereotype was often used in minstrel shows and Jim Crow-era illustrations to paint Black people as messy, childish, and lazy. The strategy was to transform the food from a symbol of freedom into a symbol of inferiority—a tactic that has been used throughout the ages to disrupt the economic and cultural power of many communities.

Matzos underwent a similar transformation. Jewish people had started to prepare bread for their long journey out of Egypt after the pharaoh had promised to free them. But the pharaoh quickly changed his mind. Jewish people had to flee Egypt quickly and did not have time to wait for the bread to rise. This unleavened bread resembling a cracker resulted from the need to survive. Because of its origins, it remains an important cultural food that Jewish people eat during Passover to remember their shared history of freedom and survival. In the late 15th century, false and inflammatory claims that Jewish people baked the blood of Christian children into Matzo crackers started to pop up, inciting violent riots often encouraged by government authorities. Later, these same blood libel charges would be used by the Nazis to stir up antisemitic sentiment in the years leading up to the Holocaust.

These racist tropes involving food have been deliberately created as a way to undermine the cultural strength and economic prosperity of marginalized communities. That is why food and food sovereignty is incredibly important. Food sovereignty, according to the U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance, is the right of peoples to define their own food and food systems. Food sovereignty plays a huge role in how we reclaim our cultures, heal ourselves, and increase prosperity in our communities. One of the largest challenges to food sovereignty is shame. Forest foods researcher and environmental journalist Aparna Pallavi discusses shame in her TEDxTalk in which she described her travels around India visiting different Indigenous communities. She found a similar pattern in most places—foods that were cultivated and imported like rice and bread had almost entirely replaced readily available ancestral foods.

Pallavi met a boy on her travels who was eating moth larvae, a traditional delicacy of the Madia Indigenous people. His parents apologized for his behavior and told her they had asked him to stop eating that particular food. Pallavi asked why, and it became clear that they had been told that eating this traditional, nutrient-dense food made them backward, uncivilized, and even subhuman.

Mahua, a flower considered nutrient-rich in both Indigenous tradition and in scientific knowledge, used to be a staple for many communities. It grows in local forests, can provide enough food for people to both eat and sell, and was used in at least 35 forgotten dishes. But this food is now banned in prohibition states like Bihar and Gujarat.

Learning these stories made me realize that food, like language and land, has often been taken away from us as we’ve been colonized or shamed out of that which has helped us survive. Here’s a question to ask yourself: “If you were to talk to your 90-year-old grandmother, would she talk about foods that you have never seen or heard of?” Pallavi asks this question in her talk, and it invites you to wonder about how many of your ancestors’ foods are no longer available to you—and why they aren’t. Some of these traditional foods might be nutrient-dense and still readily available, providing us with another opportunity to deal with the global health crisis, climate change, collapsing ecosystems, and local economies.

Truth be told, I don’t know exactly what my Afro-Cuban and Dominican ancestors were eating. And I definitely do not know what my African ancestors were eating because, like many members of the African Diaspora, I don’t even know which ethnic group(s) I am connected to. I know the meals my baasan ate, but not necessarily the meals her baasan or baasan’s baasan cooked. That loss of knowledge is connected to many things—forced and voluntary migration, enslavement, racism, colonization, criminalization, assimilation and its sometimes byproduct, shame.

Still, I can use what I do know about my family and ancestors as a starting point. The cultural foods that I do have, that I do love, that I want to discover, are part of my reclamation process. Plantains, watermelon, seaweed, and sashimi.Food is so important to our bodies, to our relationships, to our communities, and to our ecosystems. Starting with respect and curiosity for other people’s traditional foods or meals encourages connection and understanding in the face of longstanding food racism. It is a way for us to heal. Food sovereignty in action means we decide what we grow, how we cultivate our land, what we eat, who we sell to, and how much we sell it for. It gives us the chance to take back the cultural and economic power food has always provided.