Nourishing Resistance by Cindy Barukh Milstein

Title: Nourishing Resistance: Stories of Food, Protest, and Mutual Aid
Author: Cindy Barukh Milstein
Editor: Wren Awry
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 9781629639925
192 pages
Year: 2023
Language: English

Through essays, articles, poems, and stories, Nourishing Resistance argues that food is a central and intrinsic part of global struggles for autonomy and collective liberation.

From cooks who fed rebels and revolutionaries to 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 about queer potlucks, rebellious ancestors, disability justice, Indigenous food sovereignty, and fighting toxic diet culture, among many other topics. Accounts include biryani dishes at a Delhi protest, rabbit fricassee at a Puerto Rican farm, and pay-what-you-can plates at a collectively run Hong Kong restaurant. They chronicle food-distribution programs that sprung up 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 to the future, speculating about post-capitalist worlds that include both high-tech collective farms and wild-foraged roadside herbs.

Through essays, articles, poems, and stories, Nourishing Resistance argues that food is a central and intrinsic part of global struggles for autonomy and collective liberation.