Kin
kin is a project concerned with food justice, looking to create a model rooted in ‘sufficiency’ as a practice.
We shared the dream of having the kind of food that is healthy and made with the hands of medicine to be affordable and available . I specifically recall talking to the nurses who cared for me while I stayed in the hospital, about what they could and could not access to eat – about going home to cook for families after many shifts and again, what food was most affordable. The dream comes from this – it is a space, with food, cooked and otherwise – that connects producers, people running markets aimed at Black queer businesses for instance – that holds conversations about food justice.
In a year, I propose a set of conversations to consolidate some of these networks and to build a set of foundational ideals and plans. There are two frames for this: online, and around meals. I have seen the impact that organisers sharing their practice and process online has had on me, not only as a pedagogical tool, but in connecting people and networks. The practice of hosting food and eating events is the second experiment – to bring people into a room brought by the theme of a product/ project/ or process.
PROBLEM ANALYSIS
I use this broader frame of ‘contemporarity’ because I am interested in connecting the histories of how we have been dispossessed of land and of ways of being in relation to land (and each other) with present crises. Various related terms fill our present, including ‘food sovereignty’, ‘food access’ and ‘food systems’. Black activists and organizers have also used ‘food apartheid’ to offer an intersectional approach to these questions.
In South Africa, several urban gardening projects emerged out of various Black and feminist community based organisations as interventions in the past years as present austerity amplified by the heightened precarity of the Covid-19 pandemic have weakened people’s access to food.
Our present (and legacies of development processes) are densely contaminated with efficiency as the assumptive logic for how social, political and economic systems are organised. Efficiency not only supports the endemic effects of colonialism and racial capitalism, it also further entrenches epistemicide. That is, that we are further alienated from the forms of knowing connected to food, medicine, imagining, sensibilities, practices and kinship formed occasionally within and around, but often also outside of the ways that racial capital keeps us busy.
Impact
I am hoping that in a year, I can consolidate important networks and conversations. There are at least two new food sovereignty research chairs being launched in South Africa – there is a sense of urgency around these questions. It might be important to not only connect with these projects, but to also consider connecting the plans for this year towards a space (kin, as I am calling it) not only with practitioners, activists, artists and entrepreneurs, but also within research and teaching spaces as well. So this year has the intention of working strategically across these fields. I also would like to consider by the end of a year, starting gardening projects with school learners.
