food and peace

I keep having recurring thoughts and reflections on the relationship between food and peace. I'm interested in this intersection. I think about my own relationship with food, how it's always been abundant in my life, yet the relationship has gone through periods of feast and famine. I struggled with an eating disorder in college, which I've largely locked out of my writing and lately I'm wondering why. But when I think it about this period of my life and the self-depravation, especially as someone who comes from a food growing and producing family where what we put on the table is so sacred and intertwined with every aspect of our existence (personal, commercial, cultural, spiritual), I wonder if it was about more than just self-image, body dysmorphia, adolescent depression, etc. Was it also about rejecting aspects of my upbringing, the all-knowing, all-consuming relationship my family has had with food...forever. Was it also fatigue and overwhelm? I don't know. If I'm having these thoughts, it must be all of these things. I'm curious to dig it up now. Maybe I'll do this during winter break through some kind of writing exercise about food memories. Maybe I'll have AI prompt me to write about this. Or better yet, a friend. That might be interesting. Beyond myself, I'm also interested in the topic of food and reconciliation, and this partly stems from being in my farm class. I've read a lot about "weaponized famine" and we're seeing it happen in real time in places like Gaza. The quiet enduring violence of carefully separating people from their earth, foodways, and food growing, sharing, and gathering practices. This is the invisible architecture of wellness in most of our lives, the glue of abundance that holds families and communities together. I once had a conversation with a public school colleague of mine about how homework was designed for children with kitchen tables and snacks. But what if a kid goes home to a one bedroom apartment with ten people and empty fridge? Do we understand the secret shame of this and the impact it has on kids? How it can seed resentment, jealousy, anger, and ultimately violence, directed inward or toward others? This kind of deprivation, this belly bankruptcy, is under our noses everyday. I think more about space. How are food and growing spaces, from land to surfaces, places of healing and reconciliation? bell hooks speaks to this a great deal in belonging: a culture of place and other writings. About how, during the Great Migration, Black folks were duped into this idea that self-actualization as a people was impossible on the land upon which slavery took place. How Black people were yet again systematically separated from their agrarian roots and a land they had grown to know and find spiritual power in as a free people, and how that separation affected their bodies, their ability to connect with one another and the divine, and uplift through the sharing of meals, how it decimated their feelings of belonging and efficacy, entrenched loneliness in the place of rivers, affecting life down to a cellular level. The point wasn't to make an argument against leaving; it was to fairly, honestly, quietly consider what has been lost. I discovered "Conflict Cuisine" and the work of Dr. Johanna Mendelson Forman who studies how food travels with refugees from conflict zones, how diasporas seek either consciously or subconsciously to recreate belonging through restaurants and shared meals. It reminded me of this beautiful story I first saw ten years ago on PBS Newshour about a Syrian refugee camp that developed its own economy. The story centers on a family that operated food businesses, and now supplies sweets and other baked goods for celebrations happening in the camp. I watched this story over and over again and showed it to my parents and we cried because it felt so personal and triumphant to us. It crystallized the connection between food and psychological survival. Sharing food feels like sharing the truest part of ourselves and the only way to experience joy, however finite. I recently saw a similar story of Palestinian people relocating to Mexico and rebuilding opportunities through food. Thinking about food and peace feels like going beyond the platitude of connection. Going further and asking, What does that connection mean? How is it actionable in a beleaguered society? What also exists in the ecosystem of food and peace? Labor, nourishment, purpose for men and women, safety for children, faith. I'm interested in this.