I’ve finally come round to the idea that I need somewhere to archive and share the texts that I’ve been working on over the past year. It doesn’t seem complete that they exist only as instagram comments, facebook posts or text messages, seeing as it is legitimately a daily topic of ire, frustration and sadness for me. I see how a newsletter could provide a vehicle for developing new ideas in a medium that I’m traditionally quite afraid of, while providing me with a low-risk space to try out ideas and collate themes.
To be reading so much incredible writing about food sovereignty by friends and legends such as Rebecca May Johnson, The Curb, Leah Penniman over lockdown has helped me frame the work I do in a more honest light. Predominantly, local food justice and environmental activism has been the premise of my art practice for the last three years, working within structures like Brixton Pound Cafe (a radical pay-what-you-can community cafe) and the National Food Service (a network of social eating spaces and emergency food provision projects), as well as delivering wildflower walks and fermentation workshops to shift focus towards resourceful resilience using Art as a tool.
The backbone idea in this thing is hypothesising and exploring the connections between fermented foods, gut health and collective mental wellbeing. We already know some of the claimed benefits, as according to Dr. David S. Ludwig, a professor of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, states ‘Fermented foods are preserved using an age-old process that not only boosts the food’s shelf life and nutritional value, but can give your body a dose of healthy probiotics, which are live microorganisms crucial to healthy digestion.’* But I want to consider the wider effects of do-it-yourself preservation on self-confidence and self-expression, considering how taking control over some of the more niche areas of our lives can help break free from this chlorinated, plastic-wrapped nightmare of neo-liberalism. By making pickles at home we are witholding our money from a completely broken food system, where every stage from farm to table is carbon-expensive and worker-oppressive.
I wrote this recently on facebook:
if (when) there is a food shortage this year because of unseasonal weather (see climate crisis), covid-19 (see capitalism epidemic) and lack of landworkers (see racist conservatives) we better realise the fragility of a just-in-time global food system which relies so heavily on the oppression of the working classes to grow, transport and sell it, and understand the unique importance of learning how to find, grow and preserve our own. The terms 'foraging', 'organic' and 'farming' have become classed and their meanings degraded to pure aesthete - wild food, and the cultivated versions grown by skilled craftspeople, are the root, leaf and flower of all cuisine, of all medicine and of all community.
In retrospect this seems like a good enough intro to Fermental Health, so I’ll leave it there for now.
Come back soon!
*https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/fermented-foods-for-better-gut-health-2018051613841