Decolonizing local food culture: revisiting cookbooks for anti-colonial praxis

Spaces that organize around local food provisioning, such as farmers markets, tend to attract mostly white people, and there lacks a deeper understanding of the barriers racialized people face in engaging alternatives food initiatives. This research project aims to problematize local food discourse by uncovering how YUM (York University Market) staff, who are all racialized youth, make meaning of local food. Using an anti-colonial food justice praxis this research project examines the food experiences of participants highlighting family migration stories, food skills and an understanding of culturally appropriate foods. This research project seeks to foreground the experiences of racialized youth in alternative food initiatives such as the Good Food Market, which have historically been criticized for its overwhelming whiteness and perpetuation of class and racial privilege. To uncover how YUM staff make meaning of local food, I employ a mixed-methods qualitative approach; cooking as inquiry, zine-making and storytelling. Participants and I cooked recipes together that used locally sourced produce. Following these one-on-one cooking sessions, we gathered as a group to create our cookbook zine. The cookbook is an assemblage of each participants recipes. Results from the cooking sessions highlight tensions between racialized youth’s identity and local food, and that participants possessed some form of bodily knowledge that enabled them to prepare the recipes. The zine-making session highlighted the need for socially safe spaces for racialized youth to gather, especially around food.