Stop by the Central Library for this fascinating conversation with author Wren Awry about the role food plays in movements for social change. Through essays, articles, poems, and stories, their book, Nourishing Resistance, argues that food is a central, intrinsic part of global struggles for autonomy and collective liberation.

About the Book:

From the cooks who have fed rebels and revolutionaries to the 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 on queer potlucks, 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, and pay-as-you-want dishes in a collectively run Hong Kong restaurant. They chronicle the food distribution programs that emerged 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 the future, speculating on postcapitalist worlds that include both high-tech collective farms and herbs gathered beside highways.

About The Author: 

Wren Awry is a writer, editor, and archivist whose work ranges from researching and writing about the role of food in labor strikes, mutual aid projects, and revolt to helping with community dinners at their local, collectively run social center. They’ve written about food for publications including The Rumpus, Entropy, and Blind Field: A Journal of Cultural Inquiry; and have facilitated various culinary writing classes, including garden poetry for first graders and a community workshop on queer food writing. Most recently, they've been digging through radical, labor, and zine archives to find materials related to food and cooking, and are learning to build archives on their own and in collaboration with others.

Questions? Contact Kerry: keodonnell@somervillema.gov