Eric Jackson and Oliver Vodeb: Radical Intimacies Against Food Apartheid
Black community leader from Baltimore Eric Jackson and Oliver Vodeb speak about radical intimacies and Food Apartheid. The racial structuring of food production, distribution, consumption and promotion of food is deeply rooted in capitalist domination and extraction. The conversation gives deep context on Food Apartheid , explains the social situation in Baltimore and the work of Black Yield Institute a Pan African power institution working on black liberation and more.
Black Yield Institute chose food as a key medium to work in the struggle for black liberation. Being at the core of life and our relations with the world, food is used as a tool for the continuous forceful reproduction of Apartheid. Baltimore, the city where BYI operates and Eric Jackson lives, has a particularly intense situation. As we can hear in the conversation, the city's urban design directly relates to the lack of healthy food options, and the illegal drugs or also legal drugs like Fentanyl, which constitute a major problem, are directly linked with food deprivation as a means of racial domination through manipulation of pleasure.
Eric and Oliver discuss many facets of this reality, starting of course from a position that change is and must be possible tapping into a rich history of black social movements and the current amazing work of BYI as well as the collaboration between BYI and Memefest. What constitutes radical intimacies in this case? In his book chapter for our Radical Intimacies book, Eric writes about radical intimacies in relation to black people, land, food and culture. Listen to this inspiring podcast and learn about the praxis of radical intimacies in black liberation movement.
Obviously you should be reading the original chapter titled Black Land and Food Sovereignty Praxis: Humanizing and Restoring Intimacies between Land, Food, Culture, and Black People, by Eric Jackson! If you want to read the whole chapter in Radical Intimacies, Designing Non-Extractive Relationalities, find more about the book: here.
PODCAST CREDITS:
Hosted by: Oliver Vodeb/ Memefest. The podcast is a collaboration between Memefest and Intellect publishers.
Photography: Rok Klemencic, Oliver Vodeb
Music: Thanks to Bait for their song Property Law. Two best friends meeting seasonally in bucolic surrounds to generate improvised music. Property Law recognises the Indigenous peoples of the world's relationship to land. As in, "we don't own the land. The land owns us." Each of us is only passing through. Empires, Epochs come & go, but the spirit of the land persists.