logically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems.”
“You control a nation through its food and resources”
The duality of food as control and food as resistance was picked up by Laila El-Hadad, who powerfully wove together the personal and political as she shared what had brought her into these issues. As a Palestinian born into diaspora, Laila had grappled with a feeling of disconnection from her own history, people and land – a disconnect, she added, intentionally forged over time: “At the heart and root of settler colonialism is control – control over land, resources people – and forcibly disconnecting people from their land and resources.” This is exemplified by the case of Gaza, she explained, where Israel retains control of its borders, sea space, economy, and food supply. Farms on Gaza’s borders have been bulldozed time and time again, while fishermen are shot and detained for crossing lines set by Israel in Gaza’s tightly controlled waters.
In seeking to reconnect to her roots in Palestine, and in Gaza in particular, Laila found food to be a powerful means of doing so, “opening up doors to histories, peoples and lands.” A challenge, however, is that much of the most intimate knowledge on food and foodways has not been recorded, but instead is orally transmitted, and “when the Palestinian nation got scattered, that knowledge went in all sorts of places.” A deep desire to uncover, preserve and share some of that knowledge is what led Laila and her co-author Maggie Schmitt on the exploration that eventually resulted in their book, The Gaza Kitchen: A Palestinian Culinary Journey. As Maggie explains, “The best stories happen in the kitchens.” Kitchens, together with farms, she adds, are sites where meaning is constructed “because of the total materiality and the commitment to perpetuating life that you find in those two places.”
For Indigenous chef Brit Reed, a member of the Choctaw Nation currently living on a Coast Salish reservation in Washington State, the parallels between her own story and Laila’s could not be more apparent. Having been adopted and raised outside of her native land and culture, she too felt both a disconnect from her roots and a yearning to recover them, eventually finding her way back to them through food. Also like Laila, she explained how her personal experience fit into a broader – and also highly intentional – process of alienation. Starting in the 1800s, Indigenous children were sent to boarding schools to rid them of their cultures in order to “kill the Indian and save the man.” Such a practice eventually evolved into widespread trends of adoption of Indigenous children, toward similar ends.
Brit also noted parallels in control over territory and foodways in the Palestinian nation and in Indigenous nations of the Americas. Many of the existing treaties between the US government and tribal nations explicitly include rights to access customary lands and waterways outside of the bounds of reservations, which were historically prisoner of war camps. Nevertheless, acts of hunting, gathering and growing food on these customary lands have repeatedly been criminalized. Much like Gaza, this has especially been the case with the fishing of salmon and other aquatic life considered sacred to tribal communities, with Brit sharing the example of a person who was jailed 50 times in the 1970s for fishing and asserting his people’s right to fish. Such injustices persist into the present, with the Algonquin people’s struggles over sacred moose hunting grounds and the struggles of the Mi’kmaq people over lobster fisheries being two examples of countless others.
Creating spaces of empowerment and healing
For Jonathan Wilson, a multi-racial farmer of Black and Indigenous ancestry who is engaged in various farming projects along the US East Coast, “growing food and reclaiming land is about reclaiming identity that’s been stolen from all of us.” Jonathan’s approach to farming is rooted in abolition, which he sees as inextricable from food sovereignty:
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