Courtesy CCA
L-R: Gina Rae La Cerva; Andi Murphy
More than once in my life, a significant other has mentioned how she resents the holidays. It's not about disliking Christmas or New Year's Eve in and of themselves, rather it's a conditioned societal pressure that it's somehow a woman's job to be the keeper of traditions, the keeper of family, the keeper of recipes and food.
There's that harmful old assumption that a woman's place is in the kitchen, yet when we look to the world of professional chefs (be they celebrities, locals or some thing in-between), the whole operation becomes a boy's club. Why, then, when it comes to food in the home, food chains and systems or even just passing down cooking and recipe knowledge, do we look to women like it's their job?
This is just one of the questions panelists Gina Rae La Cerva, Andi Murphy (Navajo) and Paula Garcia will dig into at the upcoming Food and Feminism in the Present Day virtual panel from the Center for Contemporary Arts and it's a doozy.
"We really wanted to bring in voices you might not hear otherwise," La Cerva, who'll moderate the panel, tells SFR. "We really wanted to expand the conversation beyond the Farmers Market or the food people you regularly hear from."
In June, La Cerva released her first book, Feasting Wild: In Search of the Last Untamed Food, a melange featuring a look at international food connectivity, wild foods, foraging and more. For the upcoming panel, she says, "I'm always trying to uncover the [roles] women play historically in the food system, and women have, traditionally, been the ones to distribute the calories on this planet."
La Cerva says much of the impetus behind the panel came out of the ideas of preservation and survival relevant in her book. As the pandemic continues, for example, more people find themselves cooking at home. This has revived lost recipes for some new to the cooking game, according to La Cerva, and opened up a whole can of worms for others.
Even among her more progressive partnered friends, for example, the writer learned working from home found couples settling into more traditional (read: less equal) roles when it came to food. What might a realization like that mean for one's feminism cred? The answer is probably complicated, but if one is a feminist (like, an actual feminist), everything they do is the act of a feminist, right? Perhaps not. Should be a fun jumping off point.
For Murphy, the food quest began six years ago when she was fresh out of journalism school at New Mexico State University. A job at the Las Cruces Sun-News morphed unexpectedly into food criticism, for which, Murphy says, she discovered a preternatural knack. Still, she learned she actually knew very little about her culture's food and Indigenous food in general. Later, and with an obsession to learn more, Murphy would return home to Albuquerque for a job with the nationally syndicated Native America Calling radio program, found the award-winning Toasted Sister Indigenous food podcast and appear at speaking engagements whenever possible.
Her goal on the panel? To re-educate about feminine roles when it comes to food, and to blow the lid off the idea of what Indigenous food is and can be.
"I want people to learn about it beyond frybread," she says. "Every time people think about Indigenous food, they automatically think about Navajo tacos, even my family, but that's not even the tip of the iceberg—it's the tip of the tip of the tip."
Murphy says even she's been guilty of not looping in elders on her podcast enough (and plans to address that), but that in most cases, the matriarchs hold the keys and secrets to everything—why not food? To take it even further, why do none of us learn about Native foods when many of them (beans, corn, squash, tomatoes and potatoes to name a few) make up most everyone's diet?
"It's erasure," Murphy says. "It's erasure in every community, even our Native communities. That's when I really understand assimilation, how colonization did a number on our people—but now the educational movement is picking up steam and the food culture in advancing to a point where everybody wants to know where their food comes from. More and more, that includes Indigenous foods."
"It all ties into uncovering women's roles in the food systems," La Cerva says. "Part of it is women's labor in general being less valued, but eating every day can be such a mundane thing, and to actually feed yourself day in and out is quite a feat—so it's like we really haven't valued how much our mothers and wives and grandmothers have maintained the world through feeding."
Garcia, meanwhile, is the executive director for the New Mexico Acequia Association. At press time, she had yet to respond to a request for comment, but La Cerva says she invited her to the panel in part to point out how vital the acequia systems have been to New Mexico's culture and survival—food-based and otherwise.
So then—is there any one answer to how feminism interacts with the culture of food? Of course not, but a trio of badass women expressing perspectives and lesser-known -elements can only add to the conversation.
"What is it about women and food where it feels like there's this inherent connection that we don't necessarily value?" La Cerva asks. "We're starting to recognize that whatever it is within the feminine that is about growth and nurturing and feeding…We're realizing in these tumultuous times it's so vital and easy to lose."
Food and Feminism
6 pm, Dec. 11
https://www.ccasantafe.org/living-room-series/2423-food-feminism-in-the-present-day
