Recipes and Cookbooks: Food, Stories, Histories

Summary: "Emerging from oral histories, auto-ethnographical research and collaborative testimonios, this study documents intergenerational food justice activism by my mother and me that took root in Montebello Unified, the third largest school district in Los Angeles County, California, United States. Influenced by a familial legacy of Indigenous food knowledge, holistic healing, and herbal traditions that migrated out of Mexico and then was lovingly instilled into children and families throughout urban Los Angeles, this study reveals how a neglected community of Latinx immigrant students and education leaders developed the acceptance of experience rooted in Indigenous Latin America-based oral traditions, collaboration, and exchange as also being forms of knowledge— otros saberes (other knowledges beyond Western ways of knowing)—that led to a transformative community health model. This work documents the knowledge production of otros saberes that further deepens our understanding of social justice while providing a new epistemology for the healing of trauma in communities of color in the United States."

Summary: "This study explores the subsistence strategies and dietary practices of Indigenous people who resided in Mission Santa Clara de Asìs (1777-1836). Through the analysis of faunal remains from recent archaeological work of the ranchería, the housing location of Native families, this research reveals the persistence of Indigenous foodways within Mission Santa Clara. While colonization efforts by the Spanish impacted both local environments and traditional foodways, Native Californians continued to procure and utilize a high diversity of traditional wild fauna throughout the Mission Period. These findings provide evidence for the rearticulation and continuation of Indigenous foodways within the Mission despite social and environmental restrictions that limited access to wild resources."

Summary [English]: "Indigenous families are overrepresented among those within Canada who experience food insecurity. Studies have largely focused on northern populations, with less attention paid to southern and urban communities, including the social, cultural, and geographic processes that challenge food security. In this study, we present findings from a decade‐long community‐based study with the Southwest Ontario Aboriginal Health Access Centre (London, Ontario) to examine family perspectives related to the social determinants of food security. These topics were explored through qualitative interviews (n  = 25) and focus groups (n = 2) with First Nation mothers with young children from the city of London, and a nearby reserve community. Interviewees from both geographies identified a number of socio‐economic challenges including household income and transportation. However, some interviewees also shed light on barriers to healthy eating unique to these Indigenous contexts including access issues such as a lack of grocery stores on‐reserve; loss of knowledge related to the utilization of traditional foods; and the erosion of community, familial, and social supports. Resolving these unique determinants of food security for urban and reserve‐based First Nation families will require a range of economic and culturally specific interventions, particularly those that support development and uptake of Indigenous foodways."

Summary [English Version] - "For Indigenous peoples, land is both an agricultural and sacred space where both human and nonhuman relations work together as stewards. This study pioneers a comparative study of the traditional ecological knowledge systems (TEK) of Māori and Quechua peoples. Drawing from talking circles with Māori and Quechua people, and narrative and metaphors from these traditions, this research shows that TEK is at the heart of Quechua and Māori peoples’ food values. Further, we highlight the vital role that TEK plays in framing practices and processes that drive the restoration of Indigenous peoples’ food systems, cultural knowledge and environmental health today. This study demonstrates that food can play a fundamental role in asserting collective self-determination, for moving beyond colonial approaches to food, and ultimately for pursuing environmental justice."

Abstract: "Within contemporary concerns about the overall health of the US food system, the “local” has emerged as a key concept for strengthening sustainability, community, and access to affordable and fresh foods. For Hawai‘i, the local is more than a geographic category; it is also a core identity by which its residents mark their relationship to place. This double use of localism thereby underlines the personal—and political—stakes of “eating local” in an increasingly globalized food system. This introductory essay for a special journal issue on Hawai‘i’s Food Systems offers the island archipelago as a case study for understanding how these systems-in-place interact with, respond to, and reinforce histories of colonialism, migration and settlement, monocropping, and importation. By attending to critical discourses about localism through the geographic and social particularities of Hawai‘i, themes of place are highlighted as a central concern to the field of Food Studies today."