It is such a delicious treat to see my friend+writer/editor/baker/cook extraordinaire @wrenawry’s edited anthology #NourishingResistance (@pmpress) soon emerge in print. We can all use its stories of Wren calls “kitchen sink solidarity.”

Yet it needs a little bit of solidarity to get there: preorders via Kickstarter, http://kck.st/3VAUzIb.

As my nudge, here’s an excerpt from the foreword I was delighted to pen for it:

“It might seem paradoxical for someone who can’t cook to write a foreword for a collection of pieces—a hearty stew, as it were—about food.

“I used to dread, for instance, as I suspect my housemates did too, when it was my turn to make dinner for an anarchist collective of some twenty people. I’m also that person at potlucks who brings an uninspired store-bought item, sneaking it onto the table out of embarrassment when no one’s looking, rather than a home-baked delight like a yummy vegan casserole with ingredients from one’s own garden or scrumptious seven-layer cake decorated with foraged edible flowers. And even when Wren, during the chilly days of the pandemic, warmly snail mailed me their ‘foolproof’ recipe for antifascist eggplant parm, handwritten on a notecard, the result of my kitchen labors was a gloppy, unappetizing mess.

“Yet as I read through the stories in ‘Nourishing Resistance,’ I realized that food, as rebelliously understood in this anthology, has little to do with whether one has culinary skills or not.

“It’s enough, say, to immerse one’s hands in soapy water and be that person, aka me, who gladly does the dishes, or leaps into setup and cleanup for big communal gatherings. It’s enough to scavenge for salvaged foodstuffs as part of a mutual aid project, or ladle out entrées at an outdoor Food Against Fascism share or pipeline encampment lunch, or leave jugs of water and cans of beans in the desert borderlands as gestures of hospitality as well as solidarity for undocumented travelers, or concoct the prefigurative spaces of collective care, autonomous community, and intimate connections that happen when we include the simple act of ‘breaking bread’ together. It’s enough to recognize that food is not only life; it is one of the key ingredients in us cooking up lives worth living.” …

#BreadNotBorders #FoodNotFascism