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 and mutual aid.
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 post-capitalist worlds that include both high-tech collective farms and herbs gathered on the side of 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.