“It tastes like heaven”: Critical and embodied food pedagogy with Black youth in the Anthropocene

Abstract

Young people who navigate intersecting racial, ethnic, economic, and/or geographic oppressions are often the objects of food pedagogy. Citing childhood obesity and anthropogenic environmental change, food pedagogies in the United States especially target Black/African-American youth, among other youth of color. Meanwhile, teaching and learning about food is on the rise in myriad settings, often in ways that reproduce binaries between “healthy” and “unhealthy” and “good” and “bad” foods. Grounded in hegemonic nutrition and bolstered by healthism, predominant food pedagogies perpetuate racialized assumptions about food and health. In the context of the Anthropocene as discourse and epoch, food pedagogy is likely to intensify, while climate change holds concerning implications for Black Americans. Critical and embodied approaches to food pedagogy are necessary, I argue, to address power relations and to cultivate community-led resilience. Building on Black geographies, critical food studies, and food pedagogies, I explore the possibilities of a critical and embodied pedagogy with Black American youth. I reflect on a “Favorite Meals” workshop carried out as part of an urban farm youth program in Austin, Texas, USA. Both the practice of the workshop and youth responses counter food binaries while highlighting pleasure, play, and knowledge—all of which remain underconsidered in food-related studies and pedagogy with young people. Given concerns about childhood obesity and the global scope of the Anthropocene, this article is relevant to food pedagogy with historically marginalized youth across national contexts.

Editorial: The role of reflexivity in care-full food systems transformations

“…Authors in this special issue describe embodiment and reflexivity in (literal) digestions of diverse knowledge in creative and disruptive terms. Jones (2018) and Sathyamala (2018), for example, emphasise the ontological production of the person through what and how one eats, while Bruckner and Kowasch (2018) describe how they teach ‘what is meat?’ based on an ‘ethic of the gut’. Kiddle et al.…”

“…We learn that eating beef in the Anthropocene is therefore as much a question of animal and ecological ethics as it is of cultural ethics. Naya Jones (2018) tackles the ethics of marginalised subjects and the problem of non-specific ‘healthism’ or ‘hegemonic nutrition’ guidance. Her ‘Favourite Meals’ workshop focussed on sensory aspects of food, and was run with Black youths as participant knowledge co-producers.…”

“…This affect might be felt throughout groups of actors in place as they embody their communities of practice, enveloping the locations in which they work and making observable the potentials of organisational space. Atmospheric affect serves to geographically situate the practices and actors depicted here, whether in – but not defined by – the majority (Mann, 2018; Sathyamala, 2018) or minority world (Gordon, 2019; Hsu, 2019; Jones, 2018; Kiddle, 2019; Spring et al., 2019; Turner, 2018), rural or urban locations, or some combination of these. Mann (2018) tells how farmer-to-farmer learning, and incorporating multiple knowledge bases in food sovereignty movements, contest the corporatised food regime in her case regions of Brazil and Chile.…”

“…Raising questions of food sovereignty, Mann (2018) interrogates farmer-to-farmer teaching and learning, while Gordon (2019) focuses on a non-foundational learning of ethics. Each of the other papers addresses the mattering of learning in relation to food consumption: the ethico/religio-politics of eating meat in India (Sathyamala, 2018); the teaching and learning of a different ‘meat politics’ in European secondary schools (Bruckner and Kowasch, 2018); experimentation and experiential teaching of urban verge gardens (Hsu, 2019); collective meal making and eating as a way to convey food ethics through encounter (Kiddle et al., 2019); and the knowledge co-production of Black youths’ food consumption experiences (Jones, 2018).…”

“D.C. is mambo sauce”: Black cultural production in a gentrifying city

“…These sites—the everyday and seemingly benign—are important for critical food geographies because in their material and metaphorical forms, they reveal what is at stake for the populations with whom we partner and on whose behalf we claim to work. How they reveal themselves, however, may not always easily be seeable, knowable, or measurable if we only look to narratives of dispossession or spaces that we have traditionally turned to for understanding food inequity or justice (see Jones, 2019b for an in-depth exploration of the relationship between slow violence and the politics of visibility).…”