S 2 Episode 29 - Dr. Luz Calvo & Dr. Catriona Esquibel : Decoloninzing your Diet Part I

Tania and Peter talk to Dr. Luz and Dr. Catriona about their book about Decolonizing your Diet

Luz Calvo is a professor of Ethnic Studies at Cal State East Bay. Luz and their partner Catriona Rueda Esquibel live in Oakland, CA, where they grow fruits, vegetables, and herbs on their small urban farm as they study traditional Mesoamerican cuisine.

Catriona Rueda Esquibel : Catriona Rueda Esquibel is an associate professor in Race and Resistance Studies at San Francisco State University. Catriona and her partner Luz Calvo live in Oakland, CA, where they grow fruits, vegetables, and herbs on their small urban farm, as they study traditional Mesoamerican cuisine.

Recipes to Sustain Revolutionary Love Our project was born out of struggle and love, both personal and political. Decolonize Your Diet begins with the premise that we are living with the legacy of over 500 years of colonization. We recognize the importance of indigenous knowledge, cultures, and ways of being in the world and believe in the need to dismantle colonial systems of power. It is within these broader contexts that we issue the call to “decolonize your diet,” with full knowledge that what we need is a dismantling of our entire food-for-profit system. Another mission of this book is to encourage individuals to use food to regain physical health and nurture a spiritual connection to themselves, each other, and Mother Earth. When we say food is medicine, it is not because we think food can necessarily replace conventional. Western medical treatments, but because eating“real” food is essential to healing.

In general, our recipes highlight the immense diversity of healthy, native foods in dishes that are accessible yet satisfying. Reclaiming our vitality as a people means embracing a plant-based diet of whole foods. In our view, people can eat responsibly whether they are vegans, vegetarians, flexitarians, pescetarians, or omnivores. In a decolonial framework, there is room for multiple ways of eating, so we don’t believe everyone needs to make the same food choices. While we are committed to reclaiming knowledge about our ancestral foods, we are not calling for a rejection of any food not native to the Americas, nor do we desire

to recreate any one diet from a previous era. We understand that all cultures are living and evolving. Decolonize Your Diet does not tout certain so-called “super foods”; instead, it is a whole food system of eating. Our abuelitas (grandmothers) prepared a simple diet that was as flavorful as it was nourishing. The staples of their diets were beans and tortillas, supplemented with many fruits and vegetables: avocado, corn, tomatoes, chiles, wild greens, squash, herbs, berries, pineapples, papayas, and more. We invite readers from diverse backgrounds to take up our call to bring playfulness and creativity to cooking, to search for healthy alternatives in more than one direction, to resist the acculturation that tells us white bread is food, and to share this message with your communities: La comida es medicina, food is medicine. More than just a cookbook, Decolonize Your Diet redefines what is meant by “traditional” Mexican food by reaching back through hundreds of years of history to reclaim heritage crops as a source of protection from modern diseases.