The History of the Land (Brown et al., 2019) is a workshop, field trip, and pedagogical lens developed at Grow Dat Youth Farm in New Orleans and led with teenagers and adults. Using popular education methods, the lesson explores the relational biography of the land on which the farm currently resides. We argue that the history of the land is essential to understanding the spatial and social configurations of contemporary foodscapes; however, critical land histories are not engaged with in many alternative food initiatives and food justice organizations. We offer the adaptable pedagogical apparatus of the History of the Land as a tool for others to further the generative convergence of food geographies and anti-oppression work. In addition to discussing the workshop at Grow Dat, we reflect upon our own learning and healing from participating in an ongoing series of history of the land field trips to rural Mississippi where several of us hold deep personal ties to the land. We coauthors are a collective of farmers, food activists, educators, and academics. Across differences of gender, race, sexuality, class, location, and history, learning about the land together has brought us into intimate conversation about loss, memory, narration, transformation, and how we imagine alternate, liberatory futures.
In this paper, we situate New Orleans' post-Katrina "restaurant renaissance" within a context of historical and contemporary racial and gender inequities. This context provides a space for critical consideration of the celebratory narratives popularly attached to the city's most prominent chefs and their roles in "rebuilding" New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Our critique focuses on the practice of chef "celanthropy" (celebrity philanthropy) and the contradictions often underlying that practice. While we situate this critique in New Orleans, our analysis is more broadly applicable to what Lily Kelting has described as the "New Southern Food Movement." This movement relies on contradictory tropes of pastoral utopian pasts and harmonious multicultural futures that elide white male hegemony within the food industry, and southern food's grounding in colonialism and enslavement.
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