This week, guest Dr. Claudia Serrato opens our minds to the sensual, political, and vital nature of our relationship to food. Our bodies are a landscape in their own right and with Indigenous feminist theory in mind, this episode bears wittness to the cycles of gastronmies and of life that keep us tied to the earth. Claudia turns to her own landscape to remind us that there are times to dry up and times to bloom.  

To consume food means that we enter into a relationship with it– we physically embody it. In this conversation Claudia and Ayana dive into what that relationship could be, and how embodiment may be a spiritual quest. Honoring foodways and the gifts of the earth is about more than just changing our diets, but is rather a cultural, spiritual, and political project. How might we honor both where we came from and where we are now in ways that respect traditional foodways alongside place-based geographies/ food ways? 

Throughout the episode Ayana and Claudia dig deep into food and the memories around it– from the sensuality of texture, taste, and love in the kitchen, to ancestral memory, to the way tastes for food are passed down through the womb. Claudia explains what it might mean to eat for the next seven generations, and how such future visions are tied to a greater decolonial project, as decolonizing the body and the landscape also means decolonizing the kitchen.

Through the sacred work of food sovereignty, we can create a better kitchen, a better palate – one that resists the violence of colonization and globalization. This work is the toil of gardening, the pain of remembering, the prayers of the season. This is not easy work, but it is vital, human, and intimate. 

Dr. Claudia Serrato is a cultural and culinary anthropologist, an Indigenous plant-based chef, and a food justice activist scholar. Claudia has been writing, speaking, and cooking up decolonized flavors for over a decade by ReIndigenizing her diet with Mesoamerican foods and foodways, cooking traditions and nutrition, and culinary ways of knowing.

♫ The music featured in this episode is “Wood Drops” by Justin Crawmer, “El Lenguaje de las Plantas” by Julio Kintu (Chloe Utley), and “Mujer Torbellino” by PALO-MA (Paola De La Concha).

Episode References

Decolonization is not a Metaphor by Eve Tuck and K. Waune Yang

“Ecological Indigenous Foodways and the Healing of All our Relations”  by Claudia Serrato in Journal for Critical Animal Studies 

Through food, language and dance, Latinos preserve their unique cultural identities - ABC News 

Claudia’s Recommendations

The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America by Rebecca Earle

Recovering Our Ancestor's Gardens by Devon Abbot Mihesuah

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Kimmerer

On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics and Praxis by Walter D Mignolo and Catherine E Walsh

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