Each year, we celebrate World Food Day on October 16. To celebrate this event, Earth to Tables Legacies project has decided to reflect on the relationship between food sovereignty and breastfeeding. In its photo essay Mother’s Milk, collaborators speak about the connectivity between nourishment, localization, and food sovereignty which can all be accomplished through breastfeeding.

In both rural and urban, settler and Indigenous communities in Canada and Mexico, the diverse collaborators face both obstacles to and support for the practice of breastfeeding. As this year's World Food Day theme is  “Our Actions are our Future”, the Mother’s Milk essay aims to reflect the values of nourishment and sustainability that we hope to see for the future of food.

Learn more about the diverse cultural practices among its collaborators and storytellers, and the supports as well as the obstacles to breastfeeding in their different contexts at https://earthtotables.org/essays/mothers-milk/ 

We also recently observed the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation in Canada on September 30. Through the Earth-to-Tables project exchange,  food stories among the project collaborators also offer a window into the colonial food legacies among the Haudenosaunee (Indigenous-settler dialogue between PhD student Chandra Maracle and Ian Mosby).

The Earth to Tables Legacies interactive website – earthtotables.org  – uses food as an entry to current critical issues, such as Indigenous-settler relations, food justice and sovereignty, and anti-racism in the food movement. The launch of the interactive website offers facilitator’s guides for each of the videos and photo essays. A full-color companion book will be available in 2022 from Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

For the past six years, Professor Emerita Deborah Barndt has worked with alumna Lauren Baker as co-editor and PhD candidate Alexandra Gelis as co-director to co-create the website and book with 14 food activists in Mexico, Ontario and Quebec. Kiera Brant-Birioukov, Mohawk scholar and new member in York’s Faculty of Education, is a new collaborator taking on a leadership role.