Farming and Cooking is Organizing
Pictured here is a beautiful bed of spinach that has stayed in tact this winter at the farm of Amherst College, where I spoke two weeks ago about my co-op Woke Foods and food sovereignty. I shared how I started to cook plant based foods, became interested in farming, and cooperative economics because of community organizing.
Community organizing ignited a fire in me that at one point started to to burn me out. My intentional organizing began with collectives led by people of color that were tackling police brutality (Cop Watch Harlem) and anti Black sentiment + anti Haitian sentiment in Dominicans (mostly with La Sala and briefly with People’s Power Movement). I became involved in these collectives because I found myself in a spaces where I could not ignore issues of race and privilege. I was working for nonprofits in the Dominican Republic and in NYC that were started & led by white people. My white bosses intentions were to save people of color but were often micro-aggressive, would center themselves, and held so much of the power in the organizations. While working at an education based nonprofit in the DR my students and I were tokenized when they needed to get money from funders and while working at another education nonprofit in the Bronx I would be reprimand for calling out oppressive behaviors. I began to speak out and took action inside the organizations (but was seldom listened to) and outside in the streets with grassroots orgs (feeling all the violence and hurt towards Black and Brown people). The more I built up courage and took action, the more vulnerable I felt. It required a balanced combination of anger, compassion, vulnerability, and strength that at the time I had no idea how to do and still struggle with (cause I am a Libra). When you’re an organizer or a person that speaks on racism you can receive praise and threats. As I got more intentional with my organizing I would take the threats and opposition real personal — especially when they came from people I considered friends. So the hate messages PLUS being hyper-aware of all the injustices in the world led me to have panic attacks in the street, get huge ass stress hives, bad migraines, anxiety, and depression. On my last day at one of the nonprofits I met a Black farmer, who invited me to his farm. This led me to volunteer at his farm and many others started by other POC. The first time I put my hands in soil and worked the land (I was just picking weeds), I felt deep joy and connected to the earth. After leaving that last nonprofit I made more space for organizing, learning to farm, healing my body from trauma and strengthening my energy for the work with plants / plant-based foods, and learning how to start a business rooted in social justice.
Since “starting” this journey of organizing I have continuously felt grateful to be around and guided by Black people (mostly women) from the US, the Caribbean, and Latin America who understand the brunt of this work. Not only are they organizers themselves but they also wear the hats of farmers, chefs, herbalists, artists, and storytellers and use all of it to directly dismantle racism, the prison industrial complex, school to prison pipeline, food apartheid in NY, violence against immigrants, and other systems of oppression. They have also shown me the importance of centering healing, ancestral spirituality, and self & communal care when organizing — cause if not, this shit (read: systems) can kill you. I am privileged to have met so many guides that do liberation and social justice work centering healing practices during a time I thought I was losing my mind because I thought my deep sadness for the world was all in my head.
Farming and cooking food from the land is one of the ways I both organize and heal.
I am privileged and grateful that I get to farm and cook as a choice. For many Black and Brown people this work has been forced and traumatic — today and throughout history. I am holding the complex emotions that this work brings and want to share how grateful I am to find myself alongside so many Black and Brown people in farming, cooking, business, organizing and healing.