(Re)imagining Decolonial Cookbooks After Deforestation

Food, like most else, is fundamentally changed by colonization. It is not just the aftermath of colonization, the settlement, that changes food—it is the act of colonial infiltrating itself. Such is the case made by Fernando Ismael Quiñones Valdivia in “Colonial Imaginations: Solitude in the Cartas y Relaciones of Hernán Cortés”—though not for food but for colonized societies broadly. More specifically, he contends that a new epistemological possibility arises when colonizer regards land as an object to be conquered, which precedes the epistemological articulation of subject/object divide. His article supplies a framework for thinking about coloniality so that a close reading shows its applicability to thinking about deforestation as a distinct moment from which arises new imaginative possibilities of food. This is significant for decolonial cookbooks—a genre of cookbooks seeking to recall traditional food knowledge displaced by colonization. The problem with these cookbooks, however, is that they propose individual and community level solutions, through recipe-making, to structurally rhetorical problems of the colonization of food. Many decolonial cookbook readers are limited to industrially processed food via food deserts and corporate predation. Even when people can access fresh foods, conventional farming practices that abuse animals, subaltern workers, and the environment don’t align with decoloniality. The food sovereignty movement sees this problem, but cookbook and food sovereignty rhetorics seem mostly independent of one another. To address the limitations of recipes, I’ll build on Valdivia and other decolonial thinkers to detail the underlying settler-colonial logic of deforestation and industrialization. I argue originary foods—foods existing prior to colonization—are rhetorically displaced and Othered in a parallel fashion to the construction of the racial Other. start by introducing cookbook and food sovereignty before moving into a close reading and a discussion of deforestation. I return to the implications of the colonial imagination on present decolonial efforts and suggest cookbooks as a means toward a (seemingly) paradoxical non- and identitarian, and thus decolonial, politics of race.