Pizza on the picket lines
And reading + listening + watching recommendations (because I have little else to offer this month)
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It was my plan to write something different for this month’s issue. In fact, I started to write about how smell and taste mess with linear time and how this messing converges with, speaks to, and in many ways also mimics grief’s fickle temporalities. I’ll finish this essay one day but right now I’m feeling too tender and tired for it. This month was meant to be a post about grief. In many ways, it still is.
Since November 21 the TAs and RAs-in-lieu at the institution where I’m doing my PhD–McMaster University– are striking for a fair deal. To be honest, everything in Ontario feels like a shit storm right now. TAs and RAs at Mac are not the first educators to threaten strike action in the province in the last 30 days, the price of food continues to rise, and earlier in November, Ontario premier Doug Ford also announced plans to remove 7,400 acres from the Greenbelt (the world's largest protected farmlands, forests, wetlands, rivers, and lakes) for the construction of at least 50,000 new homes that no one in need of housing will be able to afford.
The debacle at Mac has taken most of my energies the past couple weeks because, for grad students like me, our TA pay makes up a significant portion of our paltry income. As the McMaster Community Fridge (a student-run mutual aid initiative on campus) rightly stated in a recent post “wages and tuition prices are directly connected to food insecurity.” If you care about food insecurity you must also pay attention to the ways that institutions disparage their workers. For student workers, our working hours are capped and access to our wages often depends on the payment of tuition, which is about half of our TA income (if we are graduate students and if we are granted a 130 hour position– undergrad TAs are just fucked).
Ameil Joseph, one of the many faculty at McMaster who has been showing up for grad students, wrote this helpful article about the situation at our institution and what is at stake when the cruelties workers face are not acknowledged in labour negotiations: Labour negotiations can't be in 'good faith' without acknowledging the cruelties workers face
Graphic by the wonderful Theresa N. Kenney
At a time when food security is further threatened by an institution that adamantly refuses to consider paying us adequate wages, let alone wages that account for inflation, it has been remarkable to see the kinds of resource sharing we've been practicing on the picket lines, and the kinds of care that have been extended to us by partner organizations and complete strangers.
People are dropping off meat and veggie pizzas, we’re making sure everyone gets one slice before going for seconds, folks are running around announcing “HOT COFFEE” and taking orders for those blocking traffic, there have been random donut drop-offs from associations on campus practicing solidarity, and some of us carry snacks in our bags “just in case.” These are not practices that have sprung out of nowhere. They’re not unique to our strike. Rather these practices are meaningful recurrences thrummed up from student organizers who are a part of many movements, from our research and readings, from visiting unions, from Hamilton’s labour history.
Though everything is shit, I’m happy to be sharing food with these folks, and to be treading in the wake of many histories and collaborations making meaningful change.
To help us in our fight for a fair deal follow this link: Help Mac TAs and RAs get a fair deal from their greedy institution
I don’t have much else to offer this month and I wish I did as December is a hard month in general for many, especially those who are moving through all different kinds of grief; are asked to defend their politics and/or existence at the dinner table; are working through a difficult relationship with food. Holidays can be hard and fraught. I’m sending you love and solidarity and this little list of favourite readings and cooking companions from the past couple years for joy, or comfort, or affirmation, or decompression. They all have loose food and/or eating themes, references and proximities, but that’s the only way I could narrow this list down!
Please add your favourites, food-related or not, in the comments! If you’re not a big reader, consider this a collaborative gift guide for the readers in your life (remember to buy from local bookshops when you can!!!)
Fiction
You should be able to find most of these at your local library.
If they don’t already carry them, you can also ask your local book shop to place a special order.
Butter Honey Pig Bread by Francesca Ekwuyasi
A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers
Fledgling by Octavia Butler
Not Wanted on the Voyage by Timothy Findley
Memoir/ Memoir-ish
You should be able to find most of these at your local library.
If they don’t already carry them, you can also ask your local book shop to place a special order.
Crying in H-Mart by Michelle Zauner
A Sentimental Education by Hannah McGregor
The Book of Difficult Fruit by Kate Lebo
Non-Fiction
All of these are available for free at the links included
”Feminist Killjoys (and Other Willful Subjects)” by Sara Ahmed
Alterlife and Decolonial Chemical Relations by Michelle Murphy
“Rot” issue of
Podcasts
All of these are available for free at the links included
Anything from Whetstone Radio Collective but I’ve been savouring Taste of Place as of late.
Always, always
Eating and Cooking Companions
Most of these are available for free at the links included
Whetstone Magazine and W Journal
Depression Cooking by Sonali Menezes (which I wrote about in a past issue)
An Everlasting Meal by Tamar Adler
”Ecologies of Labor in Pasta” by Adriana Gallo for Mold
Pasta Grannies on YouTube
Some very beautiful and righteously outraged reflections!
I love the idea of food-sharing being a recurrent thematic of progressive political activism as a form of care and mutual aid- so necessary in these multiple and overlapping crises we’re living through. Thinking here about Haraway introducing the companion as one with whom we break bread and the emancipatory potential of such moments.
I’m also thinking about how the circulation of nationalist icons in the form of the Tim Hortons “timbit” box and coffee has been “turned against its masters” by being taken up by striking workers against capitalism in a state that is very hostile to labour and leftist politics (as you mention).
The anxiety of hosting, of being host to the other, of writing (and cooking!) for the other is perhaps one of not having enough, but allow me to assure you, as I attempt to be a good guest, that this was a delicious and fulfilling meal!
Thank you so much for including a spoken version of this, I find it hard to sit still a read and this really lets me engage with your work. :)