30 October, 7 pm to 8:30 pm (GMT), A thoughtful discussion on Food Sovereignty between Amanny Ahmad and Nessie Reid, a virtual event hosted by GEN in Conversation for Harvest Festival Autumn 2022. 

Free to all, Register here 

Food sovereignty is about the right of communities to self-determine their food systems. It advocates for locally grown and culturally relevant food that centres health and nutrition outside the dominant models of global industrial food production. Cultivating food sovereignty is essential, not only for our individual and communal health but also for preserving our heritage, both spiritual and cultural. It is an essential ingredient in building stronger and more sustainable foundations for future generations.  

Food sovereignty in practice has many different forms. It can emerge from the grassroots through everyday activism, such as growing a vegetable garden at home or with a local community, building close relationships with local farmers and food producers or learning about plant medicine. Seed preservation, a food sovereignty practice which allows us to map and archive food histories, is especially important for colonised and dispossessed communities. What these practices have in common is a reconnection to sustainable food practices that nourish better relationships with ourselves, our communities and our planet. 

Join us for a thoughtful discussion with Amanny Ahmad and Nessie Reid, who both engage with food sovereignty through embodied and personal practices. Being embedded in local and indigenous communities, they have learned strategies of self-preservation and survival, enabling and creating networks of solidarity and exchange around food sovereignty and food justice that transcends borders. 

Join us on October 30, 2022, from 7 to 8:30 PM GMT for an intimate conversation that will explore: 

-Food sovereignty as both a personal and political act

-Food sovereignty as a tool for resistance and activism

-Supporting and creating global networks of solidarity around food justice

-The many ways in which we can engage in food sovereignty, regardless of where we live

SPEAKERS:

Amanny Ahmad is an artist, chef, forager, Ikebana enthusiast, writer, food activist and traveller currently living in upstate New York. Born in Utah to Palestinian immigrants, Ahmad spent her early life travelling back and forth between the southwestern United States and her family’s village in the occupied West Bank, where her interest in foraging began, evolving as a way of preserving the culinary traditions of her family. Since then, Ahmad, who is a self-taught chef, has studied culinary traditions and wild foodways in Italy, Mexico, Palestine and North America, in an effort to record and help preserve indigenous culinary traditions and methods of survival. 

Nessie Reid is Co-Director of the Global Diversity Foundation with Emily Caruso. She lives on an organic farm in Wales with a herd of cheeky Welsh Black cows and is a Spiritual Ecologist with a focus on agroecology, food sovereignty, health and land connection within both the UK and abroad. She has worked in Indonesia, India, Japan and Europe on local and Indigenous communities’ rights to land for growing food, as well as the preservation of traditional artistic and cultural practices. She has a degree in Archaeology and the Study of Religions with Hindi from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).