Hi everyone — Isabela here with our second-last edition of this autumn’s SPOTLIGHT series. Today, we’re honoured to feature an audio interview with Lama Obeid, a Ramallah-based writer and reporter whose work focuses on culture, gastronomy, and food politics in the context of the ongoing Israeli occupation.

This interview is a deep dive into themes from Lama’s work, which we covered in a short feature last May. Today, Lama and I discuss:

* Palestinian food culture, particularly its emphasis on communal cooking and eating

* The impact of the occupation on food sovereignty in Gaza and the West Bank

* The sensitivities of reporting on food culture and heritage when people don’t have enough food to eat

* The importance of recognizing Palestinian recipes as Palestinian

* What food means to Lama’s identity as a Palestinian woman, and much more.

A note on context

This interview was recorded in late June of 2025. The situation on the ground in Gaza has continued to evolve, but the themes discussed here by Lama remain critical. Over the summer, the world bore witness to devastating levels of starvation architected by Israel, which UN Secretary-General António Guterres referred to as a “man-made disaster, a moral indictment — and a failure of humanity itself”. While a so-called ceasefire came into force on October 10, the violence has not stopped: Palestinian health authorities said 260 people had been killed since the ceasefire began. Bisan Owda, a journalist on the ground in Gaza, reports that Israel is only allowing “junk food” to enter Gaza, and that farmers remain barred from returning to the east and north areas of the strip, which constitutes nearly all of the territory’s fertile land. “A nation that is not independent in its food cannot be free,” she adds. This echoes many of the arguments made by Lama in today’s podcast.

At the time of publishing, the UN Security Council has just voted to approve a US-backed Gaza peace plan, despite Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continuing to insist that there can be no viable path to Palestinian statehood. Even if Palestine is slipping away from the headlines, it’s imperative to continue talking about it, and we’re so grateful that Lama took the time to do that with us. To stay up to date with her work, subscribe to her incredible newsletter, I Come From There, where she shares poetry, interviews, fiction, and some of her reporting. - Isabela

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In January 2024, we sat down with hosts Jackie Turner and Matthew Kessler to record an episode for one of our favourite food podcasts, Feed by Table Debates. We’ve been fans of Feed since its inception — in the early days of FFJ, they were running a season on power in the food system — and to be hosted on our own episode was truly a dream come true. The episode was just released two weeks ago, and we’re syndicating it here as we know many of you will be interested in the topics we discussed.

This Feed season focused on the overarching question: “should food systems be more natural?” In this episode, we wanted to explore the deeper questions around “natural” diets: whose labour makes them possible, who can afford them, and how culture and experience shape our food choices. We dive into these issues and uncover how a simple "natural foods" search on TikTok exposes striking gender dynamics.

As host Jackie aptly notes in her introduction to the podcast, the political context around this discussion has changed significantly in the 13 months that have passed since recording. “Making America Healthy Again” by shifting towards more natural foods is now firmly on the U.S.’ political agenda, with RFK at the helm. Meanwhile, recent surveys show that the share of Republican men who believe that women should return to their “traditional roles” was at 48% in November 2024, up from 28% in May 2022 (among Republican women, this figure has similarly jumped from 23% to 37% ). What do these figures mean in the context of an unprecedented political interest in changing the ways that Americans eat? On whose backs are those in power expecting this shift to be built? The TikTok “Tradwife” (in essence, women who embrace and promote traditional gender roles) clips that Jackie shares with us in the episode give us some indication. In retrospect, they were a harbinger of the cultural shifts that were already churning in the last Biden year and for all of their aesthetically-pleasing serenity, offer a more dystopian vision of what (or who) will become the lifeblood of America’s “health”.

As always, we’d love to hear what you think — and please subscribe to Feed if you haven’t already!

Isabela and Zoë

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Can we square our love of animals with our inability to stop eating their body parts? In this short audio essay, Feminist Food Journal editor Isabela chronicles her evolving relationship with vegetarianism and stubborn love of offal to unpack what meat means to our sense of self.

This podcast features writing and sound editing by Isabela Bonnevera and original music by the Electric Muffin Research Kitchen.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.feministfoodjournal.com/subscribe

This is an audio reading of Meat: The Four Futures, first published last week by TABLE researcher Tamsin Blaxter as part of our MEAT issue. Tamsin breaks down the gendered dimensions of different future visions on meat, weaving together strands of feminist and postcolonial history to examine why certain futures resonate differently with different folks, and what direction techno-meat is heading in.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.feministfoodjournal.com/subscribe

Through a conversation with his father, Amirio Freeman digs into the dynamics of grilling as a queer Black man. Drawing on references to literature investigating meat’s link to masculinity, the piece offers an intimate dialogue between family members about how the act of bringing meat to a flame reflects Black food traditions in need of stewards, impositions of gender performance, and food as a vehicle for queer possibilities.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.feministfoodjournal.com/subscribe

This is an audio version of the piece “To Speak in Two Tongues”, written (and narrated here) by Mwinji Nakamba Siame for our MEAT issue.

Mwinji Nakamba Siame is a writer and budding visual artist with an interest in sharing and understanding African women’s experiences. Her nonfiction has most recently appeared in Art Dusseldorf where she wrote about the Women’s History Museum of Zambia. Her fiction is forthcoming in Chapbook format via Dancing Girl Press (US). 

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.feministfoodjournal.com/subscribe

A note from the editors: It is hard to believe that it was almost two years ago that we first published this powerful conversation with the feminist activists behind a virtual cooking class organized to raise funds for Feminist Workshop, an NGO based in Lviv, shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine. We’re not sure we would have believed you if you had told us then that the war in Ukraine would still be raging more than two years on. We also would not have wanted to believe you if you had told us just how much the scale of global conflicts would have grown in the last two years. We’ve thought about this conversation often as we’ve watched the horrors unfolding in Gaza over the last 150+ days. As one of our interviewees, Fenya, said:

I’m walking around here in Brussels and in London and seeing everyone with little banners for “welcome Ukrainians”. But then when we have these ongoing crises in Afghanistan and we have the US and Western powers actively aggravating that. And people needing to leave and people being unsafe we don’t allow them in, we allow them to drown at sea. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t support Ukrainians, but it means that we need to be a little more reflective on whose lives are worth saving. 

Although it can be painful to watch and observe how little has changed since early 2022, we believe, as Guardian columnist Arwa Mahdawi says, that bearing witness is a feminist act. Like in all conflicts, food has been central to this war: its weaponization by Israel, as it deliberately starves the population of Gaza to death, and its link to atrocities, as people waiting for aid were slaughtered in what is now grimly known as the “Flour Massacre”. We hope revisiting this podcast will offer you new insights into food, war, feminist organizing, and maybe provide a faint glimmer of hope — that for all the world’s violence, we can still find generative, creative ways of working together that don’t bolster the military machine.

This podcast was written and produced by Zoë Johnson with original music by the Electric Muffin Research Kitchen.

SHOWNOTES

Transcript

Read the show transcript here.

Resources

* Learn more about Feminist Workshop and donate to their feminist and queer mutual aid in Lviv via GoFundMe;

* Check the list of feminist, LGBTQI, disability justice groups in Ukraine and donate to them directly;

* Read the Solidarity Statement and Call for Action; and

* Follow Sonaksha Iyengar, who did the beautiful graphics for Cooking Up Resistance.

Featured Audio Clips 

* Woman at war by Benedikt Erlingsson (2018): Ukrainian folk singers

* Feminist Workshop: “Sex, Freedom, Money: What more do feminists want? (“СЕКС, СВОБОДА, ГРОШІ: ЧОГО ЩЕ ХОЧУТЬ ФЕМІНІСТКИ?”)

* NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday: “Ukrainian women are volunteering to fight, continuing a tradition”

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.feministfoodjournal.com/subscribe

In this podcast, Troy Bright, a self-taught orca researcher, shares his knowledge of orcas’ rich matriarchal societies, their unique food cultures, and how our human food systems are putting this way of life at risk. This includes over-extraction of salmon, a key food source for orcas which Indigenous nations managed sustainably for thousands of years before colonization; Isabela dig into the links between the historical treatment of Indigenous women in the salmon canning industry and high levels of food insecurity among Indigenous and racialized women in British Colombia today.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.feministfoodjournal.com/subscribe

In this episode of Feminist Food Stories, Isabela sits down with Alison Hope Alkon, Associate Professor of Teaching in the Community Studies Program in the Department of Sociology at UCSC and co-editor of A Recipe for Gentrification: Food, Power, and Resistance in the City. Published in July 2020 by NYU Press and focused on large to mid-sized cities in Canada and the US, the edited volume explores the complex links between food, urban development, gentrification, and the right to the city.

Isabela and Alison reflect on the book’s findings to discuss why we should include food in conversations about gentrification, and vice-versa; how to understand gentrification as an outcome of cultural or structural drivers; how well-intended activities like urban agriculture and food activism can inadvertently displace vulnerable communities, and how gentrification links to gender and racial justice.

Credits

This episode features research, writing, and sound editing by Isabela Vera and original music by the Electric Muffin Research Kitchen.

Big thanks to all contributors to A Recipe for Gentrification, whose insights and analysis were instrumental in shaping this interview.

Transcript

A full transcript of the episode is available online here.

Further reading

Books

Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability. (2011). Edited by Alison Hope Alkon and Julian Agyeman.

Urban Alchemy: Restoring Joy in America's Sorted-Out Cities (2013). Mindy Thompson Fullilove.

Journals

Anguelovski, I. (2015). Alternative food provision conflicts in cities: Contesting food privilege, injustice, and whiteness in Jamaica Plain, Boston. Geoforum, 58, 184-194. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2014.10.014

Anguelovski, I., Brand, A. L., Ranganathan, M., & Hyra, D. (2022). Decolonizing the Green City: From Environmental Privilege to Emancipatory Green Justice. Environmental Justice, 15(1), 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1089/env.2021.0014

Bonotti, M., Barnhill, A. Food, Gentrification and Located Life Plans. Food ethics 7, 8 (2022). https://rdcu.be/dhzRR

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Esta es una versión en audio del artículo "Sin ellas no hay maíz ni país", escrito (y narrado aquí) por María Villalpando para nuestro número de TIERRA.

You can also read and listen to the original English-language version.

En México, el trabajo y conocimiento de las tortilleras, — mujeres que hacen y venden tortillas de manera tradicional — son fundamentales para conservar la agrobiodiversidad y las prácticas alimentarias tradicionales. Al reflexionar sobre el uso de la leña para la transformación de los alimentos en el campo mexicano, encontramos el particular vínculo entre las relaciones de género, la construcción de soberanía alimentaria y el uso de recursos energéticos para la transformación del maíz en alimento. 

Por María Villalpando | Traducido por Ignacio Ahijado

María Villalpando es una estudiante de doctorado mexicana en la Universidad de California, Berkeley. María está interesada en las complejidades de los espacios rurales de México y entiende la escritura y la investigación como prácticas socialmente comprometidas.

Ignacio Ahijado es traductor, mediador intercultural y gestor de comunicación en Nested CoLab. Actualmente vive en Lisboa, enclave atlántico desde donde busca construir puentes entre personas, culturas y territorios.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.feministfoodjournal.com/subscribe