How We Eat, Who Gets to Eat?
A selection of books on the connected questions of food, land, and how we design for the a future for both human and non-human life. Drawn from my syllabus and research, this list is non-exhaustive, it will be updated periodically, and is shared freely in the spirit of open access.
It begins with the fifteenth-century papal decrees that became the Doctrine of Discovery, and traces colonialism’s effects on food systems to the present: how colonial powers used food as a weapon to control and destroy Indigenous peoples, and how that history lives on through racism, gender discrimination, and structural violence in agriculture, labor, public health, and international policy. From there it turns to food justice, food sovereignty, and Landback, and to the farmers, organizers, artists, scholars, and policymakers reimagining a food system that is both equitable and sustainable. Readers are invited to consider their own position as stakeholders in the food system, and to bring their own research, work, or organizing into conversation with these texts, alongside interviews and films, toward unlearning colonial structures that subjugate nature and erase both human and plant life.
Nourishment is a prerequisite to equity. How will we design the future of food?
A selection of books on the connected questions of food, land, and how we design for the a future for both human and non-human life. Drawn from my syllabus and research, this list is non-exhaustive, it will be updated periodically, and is shared freely in the spirit of open access.
It begins with the fifteenth-century papal decrees that became the Doctrine of Discovery, and traces colonialism’s effects on food systems to the present: how colonial powers used food as a weapon to control and destroy Indigenous peoples, and how that history lives on through racism, gender discrimination, and structural violence in agriculture, labor, public health, and international policy. From there it turns to food justice, food sovereignty, and Landback, and to the farmers, organizers, artists, scholars, and policymakers reimagining a food system that is both equitable and sustainable. Readers are invited to consider their own position as stakeholders in the food system, and to bring their own research, work, or organizing into conversation with these texts, alongside interviews and films, toward unlearning colonial structures that subjugate nature and erase both human and plant life.
Nourishment is a prerequisite to equity. How will we design the future of food?
Food: Radical Pedagogy and Care Adapted from a talk for LA ESCUELA___'s decentralized symposium, Education as Resistance (2026)
At the intersection of documentary, participatory art, and radical pedagogy, I develop projects that grow from questions I carry into research, relationships, and collective imagination. Food is not only a meal but a container: it creates conditions for gathering and relationality that can only emerge through shared space and learning together.
This methodology takes different forms depending on context. In Carry for Historias, mobile kitchen carts travel across the Lower East Side, using shared recipes to gather oral histories; in in-home interviews, a shared meal opens space for testimonies that participants review and consent to before anything enters the archive.
In Future Food with Creative Time, I developed five public dinners drawing on two years of research, spending extensive time with abolitionists, formerly incarcerated people, Indigenous knowledge holders, migrants, NYCHA residents, and urban farmers, building relationships before creating each program. The meals were both the culmination of that research and a bridge to collective engagement, turning what might have been artist talks or panels into horizontal learning, where participants gathered around food as active collaborators rather than passive recipients. Each dinner explored food sovereignty, prison abolition, Indigenous land relations, or migration through the act of sharing a meal.
With the Institute for Public Architecture's Ecological Test Kitchen, I developed a living laboratory framework for metabolic architecture, asking how food systems, architecture, and climate justice intersect, and positioning design as a tool for ecological and social transformation.
These projects share core commitments: partnering with established organizations rather than arriving as an outside intervention; centering community agency through rigorous consent practices; refusing extraction by making sure documentation serves participants' own purposes; and treating the meal as pedagogy, where cooking, eating, and speaking become sites of knowledge production. The work addresses connected social and ecological issues: migration, labor precarity, food sovereignty, and land relations. The shared meal becomes a foundational method of pedagogical resistance.
gracias.
At the intersection of documentary, participatory art, and radical pedagogy, I develop projects that grow from questions I carry into research, relationships, and collective imagination. Food is not only a meal but a container: it creates conditions for gathering and relationality that can only emerge through shared space and learning together.
This methodology takes different forms depending on context. In Carry for Historias, mobile kitchen carts travel across the Lower East Side, using shared recipes to gather oral histories; in in-home interviews, a shared meal opens space for testimonies that participants review and consent to before anything enters the archive.
In Future Food with Creative Time, I developed five public dinners drawing on two years of research, spending extensive time with abolitionists, formerly incarcerated people, Indigenous knowledge holders, migrants, NYCHA residents, and urban farmers, building relationships before creating each program. The meals were both the culmination of that research and a bridge to collective engagement, turning what might have been artist talks or panels into horizontal learning, where participants gathered around food as active collaborators rather than passive recipients. Each dinner explored food sovereignty, prison abolition, Indigenous land relations, or migration through the act of sharing a meal.
With the Institute for Public Architecture's Ecological Test Kitchen, I developed a living laboratory framework for metabolic architecture, asking how food systems, architecture, and climate justice intersect, and positioning design as a tool for ecological and social transformation.
These projects share core commitments: partnering with established organizations rather than arriving as an outside intervention; centering community agency through rigorous consent practices; refusing extraction by making sure documentation serves participants' own purposes; and treating the meal as pedagogy, where cooking, eating, and speaking become sites of knowledge production. The work addresses connected social and ecological issues: migration, labor precarity, food sovereignty, and land relations. The shared meal becomes a foundational method of pedagogical resistance.
gracias.