Hungry Work
Lola Olufemi on the role of food in radical social movements. Illustration by Hannah Buckman.
Good morning and welcome to Vittles. Each Monday we publish a different piece of writing related to food, whether it’s an essay, a dispatch, a polemic, a review, or even poetry. This week, Lola Olufemi explores the centrality of food to the history of radical movements both in the UK and further afield, the kitchen as a site of political strategising, and the importance of rejecting false narratives of scarcity in working towards futures of collective abundance.
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Hungry Work
Lola Olufemi on the role of food in radical social movements. Illustration by Hannah Buckman.
1
‘This “history of the greats” will by necessity ignore the masses of women who have been the backbone of the black struggle, those women who ran the hostel services and food kitchens in the League of Coloured Peoples in the 1930–50s; women who made sure that the minutes of meetings and conferences were kept, which have made an analysis of the Pan-African and Home Rule movements in British history possible.’
—Julia Chinyere Oparah,‘Other Kinds of Dreams’: Black Women’s Organisations and the Politics of Transformation
I imagine a modest-sized kitchen at the first meeting of the League of Coloured Peoples in 1931. The meeting – held at the YMCA on Tottenham Court Road – ends at around 2pm, and is followed by refreshments. When the men snake their heads around the corner to check on the kitchen’s progress, they see a group of women huddled around a centre table. The cotton tablecloth is adorned with an intricate red and green pattern. The women are counting dinner plates and glasses, making sure they have enough portions of rice for every person in attendance. These are women with political agendas that go beyond the removal of the Colour Bar. They do not agree that the League should focus all its energy on appeals for representation from the colonial British government, or that the League should seek to simply correct ‘racial misunderstanding’ – they find Harold Moody’s agenda far too conservative. They believe that the negro worker must determine their own fate. This is part of the task the women undertake when they cook. They reveal how the engine of struggle is located in the kitchen, where they reproduce one another hourly, daily, weekly. This is not a gendered act of service: it is the maintenance of life.
*
History is littered with many such kitchens. Domestic work, and cooking in particular, has always been a sustaining force for radical social movements: the transformation of any social and political landscape is hungry work. Food is a focal point around which communities under threat solidify their interdependence, not only bringing people together but also structuring how they relate to each other, providing parameters for frequent meeting and exchange. A meal cooked in a community kitchen once a week can be enough to sow the seeds for critical analysis – beginning perhaps with joint observations about the local area, and expanding when people and their neighbours start to ask why things are the way they are. When we sit and eat with others, with people who believe in the real possibility of freedom, we rescue the act of tasting and digestion from a world where food is reduced to fuel for labour. The questions we ask ourselves when planning a meal, much like the ones prepared by the unnamed women of the League of Coloured Peoples, are the same questions political organisers ask themselves: What do we want? With whom? How long will it take us to prepare? How will we feel when we are finished?
In efforts to recover histories lost to the masculinist character of certain political organisations, such as the British Black Panthers and the Black Unity and Freedom Party, there is a tendency to conceive of the kitchen and the process of food preparation as gendered ancillaries to the ‘real’ work of politics that occurred inside the meeting room, to imagine the woman performing this labour as perpetually silenced and hushed. In their 1982 Editorial, first published in community newsletter SPEAK OUT!, the Brixton Black Women’s Group noted that it was their designation as cooks and notetakers in the movement that reproduced the gendered subordination they sought to escape:
‘So black women[1] were left in a kind of limbo – damned if we did and damned if we didn’t. Our roles for the revolution were to be as coffee-makers, cooks, fundraisers, and, of course, willing sexual partners, while the men conducted the important business of the struggle.’
In refusing such a limiting designation of women’s roles in the revolution, they began to understand that work undertaken inside the kitchen was not an act of love but of labour, and that this labour was intrinsically linked to the political strategies being devised outside of it. By reclaiming autonomy, every space where women gathered could be made political.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the Marxist and socialist critiques of the operation of capitalism, gender, and race that were developed and practised by Black and racialised women’s organisations in the UK were couched in the formation of communities in which the work of social reproduction (caring labour such as cooking, cleaning, and emotional support, which produce the worker over and over again) was central. Groups like the Brixton Black Women’s Group, the Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent, the Black Women’s Action Group (which started in a council flat on the Aylesbury Estate in Walworth and later became the Southwark Black Women’s Centre), Awaz, the Abasindi Co-operative, and the Walsall Black Women’s Centre were founded on principles of communalism, which extended to the preparation and consumption of food in homes, at conferences and community events. Records of shared meals litter oral histories, interviews, and editorials.
Often, the joint preparation of meals was a way to offset dire material conditions experienced by the racialised poor: joint meals meant lower costs, shared labour, and free childcare. At crucial junctures, cooking food became a means of expression, a way for members to signal that they cared for one another. This caring labour was crucial to the community support, defence committees, and forms of organisation that preceded and followed the 1981 uprisings in Brixton, Toxteth, Handsworth, and Moss Side. Would campaigns related to the Sus Laws, the Railton 4, the Bradford 12, state sexual violence (through so-called ‘virginity testing’ at Heathrow Airport), the infamous Grunwick Strike, or local demands for better housing and schooling for young children have been possible on empty stomachs?
*
In an interview about her book Finding a Voice: Asian Women in Britain (1978), a ground-breaking analysis of South Asian women’s subjectivity and political organising, feminist and anti-racist activist and scholar Amrit Wilson recalls an interaction with one of her research participants:
I told her that I was writing a book and she said she wanted to tell me about her life. I can never forget the way she told her story and the need she felt to do so. I remember she offered me some food and there was a very hot chutney – it was so nice but so hot. And then suddenly we were both crying, I don’t know if it was the chillies … She told me so much.
Here, a shared meal became the grounds upon which the relationship between interviewer and interviewee was built. Food strengthened the capacity to share, for the woman in question to divulge the story of her migration to the UK and the racism she experienced at the hands of the state. In this anecdote, we might understand chutney as a serious component of political thinking, as a gustatory experience which brought forth the opportunity to expand political consciousness! This instance teaches that bodily experience, the satisfaction that occurs after a shared meal, cannot be neatly separated from the historical narratives and political subjectivities that produce us in time and space. Suddenly they were crying, and they did not know whether it was because of the chillies themselves or whether the act of sharing a meal had enabled them to open up to one another, as Asian women exiting Britain’s post-war consensus and emerging into a political landscape brimming with possibility.
From the beginning of Black and racialised feminist political formations in Britain, food was a means of recruitment, an invitation to step away from the state and towards one another, a balm for the soul while the world outside the estate walls continued to crumble. The work of social reproduction not only makes and remakes the worker (and therefore life), but itself manufactures all manner of affects and emotional states of reliance – love, comradeship, solidarity – which lessen the perceived gap between what political subjects desire and what they are capable of building for themselves and others.
2
In 1967, Fannie Lou Hamer, the Black radical leader born to sharecroppers in Mississippi, established the Freedom Farm Cooperative. Hamer purchased forty acres of Delta land for community use, where Black farmers planted soybeans, cotton, cucumbers, peas, beans and squash with membership dues of a dollar or less. Hamer sought to undo the effects of the ‘Great Land Dispossession’, state-sponsored land grabs that saw the early descendants of freed slaves lose land due to improper paperwork, land seizures, and debt bondage, all of which were bolstered via dispossession through federal regulations, lynchings, intimidation, and the Jim Crow laws. Many labelled Hamer’s endeavour utopian; a 1969 speech, though, demonstrates that Hamer’s motivation was more pragmatic: ‘We are sick and tired of seeing people lynched, and raped, and shot down all across the country in the name of law and order and not even feeding the hungry across the country.’ The land was bought with a key question in mind, one that Ashanté M Reese elucidates beautifully: ‘Who is going to feed our communities?’
*
Food is also a weapon. As the Sudanese Revolution began to spread in 2018, it was the vital work of the grassroots resistance committees (whom Lina Dohia has described as ‘carriers … of … imaginative practice … that subsequently became the centre of revolutionary and collective struggle’) that kept it alive. Groups began cooking inside their homes, in local mosques, and in community kitchens, feeding their neighbours and those who refused to move from the streets, as they gathered to enact the death of Omar al-Bashir’s regime. When the state collapsed, the resistance committees focused on the provision of sustenance. Revolution requires this kind of reproductive labour, the capacity to affirm life by meeting basic needs.
Years later, in the midst of a counterrevolutionary war, the work of the resistance committees continues, showing that it is possible, even in a time of violent dispossession, to buoy one another. In March, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces arrested activists in Khartoum, as they were supervising soup kitchens feeding thousands of hungry people. Both the Rapid Support Forces and the rival Sudanese Armed Forces were intent on, and have succeeded in, driving the population into famine, an attempt to break the liberatory echoes of the revolution and curtail resistance from the working class. Yet another example of how (manufactured) hunger can change the course of history.
3
The effects of fifteen years of austerity have shaped the UK’s cultural and political imaginary such that scarcity and lack are now the virtues upon which state allocation of resources depends. But when half a million children in England face the prospect of going hungry this month and more people rely on food banks in Britain than ever before, the question of nourishment remains urgent. Rather than addressing the growing hunger crisis by recognising human dependency and need, approaches to food systems and social welfare have prioritised food production, privatisation, and consumer choice. Such decisions are made possible by the violent underbelly of exploitative labour that powers food supply chains. There is no ‘consumer choice’ absent the migrant workers from Bolivia, South Africa, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, who pick fruit and farm in ‘slave-like’ conditions, with little to no recourse to fight back against sexual and racial harassment, in order to sustain the rising demands of the British agricultural sector. For those with attachments to freedom, the question is always the same: how can we break such vast and extensive systems of violence?
Looking across borders and temporal lines provides evidence of how historical and contemporary radical social movements have transformed material conditions without aid from the state. In learning from the radicalism of the 1970s and 1980s, we needn’t despair at the frustrating particularity of the present. We might instead look to the growing popularity of food cooperatives enacting principles of mutual aid – political engagement, solidarity, and non-hierarchical organisation. These cooperatives stand in stark opposition to the benevolence of food banks as evidence of the ability to immediately resist the political condition imposed upon us by neoliberal state policies.
Groups like Cooperation Town, a network of thirty self-organising neighbourhood co-ops from Gospel Oak to Kentish Town, encourage members to organise against food poverty in ways that work against the charity and food bank model and give them back dignity and autonomy. Cooperation Town provides resources, infrastructure, and advice for community members wishing to start their own cooperatives. They encourage members to analyse the political roots of food poverty, building links with their neighbours to organise the purchase, storage, and distribution of food or to access surplus produce from supermarkets, because, as one Cooperation Town organiser explains, ‘there is no real shortage of food, there is just an unequal distribution of resources’. We hear the echoes of radical practice in this analysis, which refuses to capitulate to the logic of scarcity, and instead seeks to close the gap between those who are able to access nutritionally rich foods and those for whom hunger and rationing are a daily occurrence.
Elsewhere, grassroots collectives like Land in Our Names draw their political practices – of food sovereignty, justice, and the continued development of holistic relationships with the land for Black and racialised communities in the UK – from the vibrant history of land struggles in Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde, as well as from agrarian farm workers in Palestine. Their call for reparations is a call to disrupt the structural forces of racism, capitalism, and colonialism, and to understand how all three have shaped present-day systems of land ownership through plantation economies and trespass laws. Practically, this means fighting to improve working conditions for migrant agricultural workers, procuring land for community growing, and addressing racist planning departments that designate the use of land in local towns and councils. Such efforts should not be dismissed or downplayed: they represent the possibility of seriously fracturing the seeming impenetrability of systems of exploitation in the present.
Radical practices of food preparation, distribution, and production by Black and racialised women’s organisations in the UK and internationally show that it is impossible to think about food in isolation. A more integrated approach is needed, one that recognises that what and how we eat is intimately tied to our social condition and our capacity for transformative action. Food systems are knitted across borders, and depend on violent processes of extraction that can and should be read in tandem with an analysis of social reproduction. These reciprocal relationships are determinative: ‘good’ food – sensorially stimulating food that is unmoored from gendered labour – is a fantasy while any person anywhere remains unfree. The kitchen will remain a site of domination as long as ingredients are sourced using methods of acute violation. Food production is a political arena: what we eat contributes to the construction of a social body which, if we are to adequately confront a myriad of ongoing threats – rising fascism, climate catastrophe, our government’s active participation in genocidal warfare in Palestine – must be driven by a communal approach to life. Hollow mantras of consumer choice and charities plugging the deliberately constructed holes in the state’s social provision will never remedy the types of social, political, and bodily hunger we experience. Only remaking the world can do that.
[1] In the 1970s and 1980s, the use of the term ‘Black’ signalled a theoretical and activist tradition that identified political subjects with a shared history of British colonialism into a coherent group for the purposes of political demand-making and working across difference. This term was a geographically contingent marker of common experience, used in grassroots organising as a means of self-titling racialised subjects from African, Caribbean, Asian, and Latin American backgrounds whose material conditions were determined by histories of imperial violence and the racist legislation that defined the post-war era of the British Commonwealth.
Credits
Dr Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer and Stuart Hall Foundation researcher from London, based in the Centre for Research and Education in Art and Media at the University of Westminster. Her work focuses on the uses of the political imagination and its relationship to cultural production, political demands, and futurity. She is the author of Feminism Interrupted: Disrupting Power (Pluto Press, 2020) and Experiments in Imagining Otherwise (Hajar Press, 2021) and a member of bare minimum, an interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective.
Hannah Buckman is an illustrator and artist based in London. They can be found at hannahbuckman.com or at @hannahbuckmanillustration on Instagram.
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Absolutely brilliant!