Key ingredient: Raised awareness
When it comes to addressing social injustice, food is both the message and the medium. From ingredient sourcing and labor practices to school lunch policies and professional kitchen culture, the many working parts of our food system offer entree into understanding a scope of issues affecting vulnerable communities. The food space is also where we find powerful tools for effecting change. A new wave of women working in the food world see the humble cookbook as one such tool.
Released in October by Chronicle Books, celebrated cookbook author Julia Turshen’s “Feed the Resistance: Recipes and Ideas for Getting Involved” seeks to empower home cooks and concerned citizens to use their interest in food to advocate for rights and protections during a time of rising political uncertainty. All of the book’s proceeds will be donated to the ACLU.
Turshen, who has co-authored numerous notable cookbooks and last year debuted her first solo title, “Small Victories,” lives in New York’s Hudson Valley, where her longtime experience as a volunteer with hunger relief programs has impressed upon her the simple power of feeding one’s community. Motivated at the start of this year to get involved with local social justice organizations, Turshen soon realized that her skills with recipe planning and feeding large groups of people could easily extend to the arena of political activism. Now Turshen hopes to encourage others to parlay their culinary experience for the greater good. Her new book features nearly 30 recipes, over half of which are contributed by chefs and food activists who inspire her, and dishes fall into three categories intended to nourish and fuel the many manifestations of the socalled resistance movement.
The first, “Easy Meals for Folks Who Are Too Busy Resisting to Cook,” includes three variations on the quick and versatile Puerto Rican rice and egg dish arroz a caballo, contributed by food writer and radio producer Von Diaz. The “Baked Goods and Portable Snacks” section includes Turshen’s own prêt-à-protest baked oatmeal and apple squares. “Feeding the Masses: Food for Crowds” features Oakland-based food writer Stephen Satterfield’s powerhouse vegetarian three-recipe set, which he calls “a resistance meal for the masses on the simple and cheap” — baked Japanese sweet potatoes, oven-roasted tomato sauce, and baked polenta. Of Satterfield’s contribution, Turshen said, “I think that recipe, which is obviously so much more than a recipe, is such a great indicator of what’s in the book: It’s affordable, it’s nourishing, it’s delicious, it’s easy to make, it’s easy to share — it’s really doable. To me that’s the biggest thing about this book, that everything is doable, whether it’s something you cook or an action you take.”
In keeping with this principle, Turshen has eschewed the styled food photography that most often accompanies cookbook recipes in favor of essays on issues of food and justice from people whose voices she sought to amplify. Caleb Zigas, who directs the San Franciscobased organization La Cocina, which provides professional kitchen space and resources to lowincome food entrepreneurs, makes the case for creating viable paths to economic independence for these kinds of small businesses.
The book closes with sections offering “Ten Ways to Engage That Aren’t So Obvious” (bring homemade banana bread to local first responders) and “Ten Things You Can Do in Less Than Ten Minutes” (choose an immigrant-run restaurant for your next meal out), asserting that taking tangible action for good is doable on any scale and that often the best vehicle to drive this action is food.
Another new cookbook, “Cooking Up Trouble,” is a self-published effort of culinary activism by Santa Barbara-based photographer and cookbook author Leela Cyd (her other books include 2016’s “Food With Friends: The Art of Simple Gatherings” and “Tasting Hygge,” out this month from Countryman Press) and Portland-based food stylist Anne Parker (her clients include Elle à Table and Salt & Straw). First released in June and now in its fourth printing, the cookbook is the result of its creators’ mutual desire to harness their food world platforms and large social media reach to support a cause. All proceeds of the book, which is sold through their website CookingUpTrouble.org, will go to Planned Parenthood, an organization whose host of services are, in the views of Cyd and Parker, invaluable in the face of mounting threats to women’s rights.
The cookbook’s title references the label with which women who assert their rights are often tagged. But far from troublesome are its many intuitive and artfully styled recipes. Easily adaptable grain bowls, breakfast salads, simple salmon preparations, and fresh smoothies expose the West Coast origins of most of its 35 recipes, which come from Cyd, Parker and several other women working across creative fields. Among the contributions is a rose-petal-adorned riff on homemade chai tea from a 7-year-old girl who attended the women’s march in Los Angeles with her mother.
Cookbook activism is not a new act of subversion by women in this country. Compiled in 1886 by Boston-based Mrs. Hattie A. Burr, “The Woman Suffrage Cookbook” raised funds for the suffragist movement and featured recipes from the likes of prominent women’s rights activist Lucy Stone.
The civil rights movement yielded an even richer legacy of grassroots food activism, to which Georgia-based baker and author Cheryl Day pays homage through her contribution for Chocolate Espresso Pie Bars in “Feed the Resistance.” In introducing her recipe, Day recalls the baking and fundraising efforts of a cafeteria worker named Georgia Gilmore, who led a group of Alabama women in creating a secret network of bake sales that helped to cover transportation costs for those boycotting the Montgomery bus system in protest of its segregated seating.
Over half a century later, women like Turshen, Cyd and Parker are again looking to leverage their talents within the food world — as well as their positions of privilege — to support the causes they believe in.
Turshen’s hope is that now, as it has before, the act of providing tools to help people feed one another will prompt positive change.
“Food is the most unbelievably democratic thing,” she said. “I think that we should recognize its potential to bring us together and to give us a better understanding of each other.”