Decolonizing Food

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Decolonizing Food

Decolonizing food is the process of examining and dismantling the colonial systems that have shaped agriculture, diets, land ownership, nutrition, trade, culinary culture, and access to food. It also involves restoring the authority of Indigenous peoples, formerly colonized communities, and marginalized food producers to determine how food is grown, gathered, prepared, distributed, and understood.

Colonial food systems were not limited to the introduction of new crops or cooking techniques. Colonization frequently involved the seizure of land, destruction of local ecosystems, suppression of traditional agricultural knowledge, forced dependence on imported foods, displacement of farmers and harvesters, and replacement of community food systems with plantations, commercial markets, and government-controlled supplies.

Decolonizing food therefore extends beyond personal dietary choices. It includes struggles for land rights, seed sovereignty, cultural recognition, political self-determination, environmental restoration, community health, and control over food economies.

Colonialism and the Transformation of Food Systems

Colonial governments often reorganized food production to serve imperial markets rather than local communities. Diverse farming, fishing, hunting, herding, and gathering systems were replaced or restricted by plantations, export crops, private property laws, industrial agriculture, and commercial resource extraction.

Traditional foods were frequently portrayed as primitive, unhealthy, or inferior. At the same time, colonial societies adopted, renamed, commercialized, and profited from foods and agricultural knowledge developed by Indigenous peoples and colonized communities.

These transformations contributed to the decline of local biodiversity and increased dependence on imported grains, refined sugar, processed foods, canned products, and government rations. In many communities, contemporary food insecurity cannot be separated from histories of land dispossession, forced relocation, environmental degradation, and restrictions on traditional harvesting.

Food could also be used as a weapon. Colonial and settler governments sometimes destroyed crops, restricted hunting and fishing, slaughtered culturally important animals, controlled food distribution, or withheld supplies to force communities from their lands and weaken political resistance.

Indigenous Food Sovereignty

Indigenous food sovereignty refers to the right and responsibility of Indigenous peoples to control their own food systems according to their cultures, laws, values, and relationships with the natural world. It differs from conventional food security, which generally focuses on whether people have enough food without necessarily asking who controls the land, production, distribution, or decision-making.

Food sovereignty emphasizes self-determination. Communities decide what foods should be produced, how land and water should be cared for, how knowledge should be transmitted, and how food should be shared. Food is understood not merely as a commodity but as part of a network of relationships among people, plants, animals, ancestors, waters, territories, and future generations.

Indigenous food-sovereignty movements include tribal farms, community gardens, seed-rematriation projects, traditional harvesting programs, food laboratories, Native-owned restaurants, youth education, language revitalization, and the restoration of fishing, hunting, and gathering rights.

These initiatives strengthen cultural identity while reducing dependence on food systems controlled by outside governments, corporations, or charitable institutions.

Land, Seeds, Water, and Ecological Restoration

Land justice is central to food justice. Communities cannot fully control their food systems without meaningful access to farmland, forests, rivers, fisheries, grazing territories, and culturally important gathering places.

Land rematriation and land-back movements seek to restore Indigenous stewardship and community authority over ancestral territories. These movements challenge the idea that land is simply private property or an economic asset. Instead, land is understood as a living relationship involving reciprocal responsibilities.

Seed rematriation returns ancestral seeds to the communities from which they originated. Colonial expansion, commercial seed markets, agricultural research institutions, and private collections removed many seeds from Indigenous control. Returning these seeds supports biodiversity, cultural renewal, climate resilience, and the revival of traditional foods.

Ecological restoration is also a form of food-system restoration. Tribal and Indigenous-led programs have reintroduced buffalo, restored salmon habitats, removed dams, protected wild rice, revived camas prairies, and renewed culturally important forests and wetlands.

Buffalo restoration reconnects Plains communities with food, ceremony, education, ecological management, and tribal economies. Salmon restoration strengthens river ecosystems, treaty rights, nutrition, and cultural practices. The protection of manoomin, or wild rice, brings together food sovereignty, climate adaptation, water protection, and the recognition of plants as living relatives.

Decolonizing Diet, Health, and Nutrition

Colonial disruption of traditional food systems has contributed to major changes in diet and health. Communities that once relied on locally cultivated, gathered, hunted, or fished foods were often pushed toward processed foods and imported commodities with high levels of refined carbohydrates, sugar, salt, and unhealthy fats.

The resulting health problems cannot be explained solely as matters of individual behavior. They are connected to land loss, poverty, environmental contamination, inadequate infrastructure, disrupted cultural knowledge, and limited access to traditional foods.

Decolonizing diet involves rebuilding relationships with ancestral ingredients and food practices. It may include growing traditional crops, gathering wild plants, fishing, hunting, preparing foods according to community knowledge, and teaching younger generations about the cultural and ecological meanings of food.

Traditional foods can support physical health, but their importance is broader than nutrition. Harvesting, cooking, and sharing food can strengthen identity, language, family relationships, spiritual well-being, and cultural continuity.

Schools and health institutions can support this work by including traditional foods in meal programs, working with Indigenous producers, teaching local food history, and confronting colonial assumptions within nutrition and dietetics education.

Indigenous Chefs and Culinary Revival

Indigenous chefs, cooks, farmers, and food educators have become important leaders in the movement to decolonize food. Their work challenges the widespread misconception that Indigenous cuisine belongs only to the past.

Restaurants and food laboratories can create markets for Indigenous farmers, train Native workers, preserve culinary knowledge, and introduce the public to foods that existed before colonial borders and industrial agriculture.

Some chefs develop menus without ingredients introduced through European colonization, such as wheat flour, dairy products, cane sugar, beef, pork, and chicken. Instead, they center regional plants, fish, game, berries, corn, beans, squash, wild rice, mesquite, cactus, bison, and other place-based foods.

This work is not an attempt to freeze Indigenous cuisine in a historical period. Indigenous chefs combine tradition, experimentation, ecological knowledge, and contemporary culinary methods. Their food presents Indigenous cultures as living, innovative, and future-oriented.

Native-owned restaurants and food businesses can also strengthen community economies by purchasing from Indigenous producers and keeping more food-system wealth under Indigenous control.

Black Food Sovereignty and African Diaspora Foodways

Colonialism and slavery profoundly shaped Black food systems throughout Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and the Americas. Enslaved Africans were forced to labor within plantation economies while also drawing on agricultural knowledge, seeds, cooking methods, and medicinal traditions from their homelands.

Provision grounds, community gardens, fishing, foraging, and household food production allowed enslaved and formerly enslaved people to survive while preserving elements of African culture. African diaspora cuisines developed through memory, adaptation, resistance, exchange, and creativity under oppressive conditions.

Black food sovereignty movements connect food justice with land ownership, reparations, cooperative economics, urban agriculture, mutual aid, abolition, and the survival of Black farming traditions.

These movements also challenge the erasure of Black culinary knowledge. Foods associated with African American, Caribbean, and African communities have often been stigmatized when prepared within those communities but celebrated, renamed, or commercialized when adopted by dominant food industries.

Decolonizing Black food systems means recognizing the expertise of Black farmers, cooks, historians, organizers, and communities while addressing unequal access to land, capital, markets, healthy food, and political power.

Food Sovereignty in Hawaiʻi, the Pacific, Australia, and Aotearoa

Across Hawaiʻi and the Pacific, colonial governments and commercial industries transformed land use, water access, labor, agriculture, and patterns of food consumption. Plantation economies and dependence on imported foods weakened local food systems and contributed to environmental and public-health problems.

Native Hawaiian food sovereignty includes restoring kalo, breadfruit, fishponds, native plants, water systems, and community agriculture. These practices connect food with Hawaiian sovereignty, cultural survival, disaster resilience, and resistance to the concentration of land and water in corporate hands.

Māori approaches to kai sovereignty emphasize relationships among food, whenua, identity, knowledge, health, and rangatiratanga. Māori food insecurity is connected to the loss of land, restrictions on customary harvesting, marginalization of mātauranga Māori, and limits placed on community self-determination.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander food sovereignty similarly involves protecting Country, cultural knowledge, native foods, and community authority. It also requires ensuring that commercial interest in Australian native ingredients does not exclude Indigenous peoples from ownership, recognition, or economic benefits.

Caribbean and Latin American Food Decolonization

Caribbean and Latin American food systems reflect Indigenous cultivation, African diaspora knowledge, European colonization, plantation agriculture, migration, and global trade.

Colonial economies often concentrated land in plantations producing sugar, coffee, bananas, tobacco, and other export crops. This reduced the land and resources available for local food production and created long-term dependence on imported foods.

Food-sovereignty movements in Puerto Rico and throughout the Caribbean promote agroecology, seed libraries, farmer networks, community kitchens, renewable energy, and local food distribution. These projects seek to reduce dependence on colonial trade systems and strengthen resilience during hurricanes and other disasters.

The revival of cassava, maize, beans, native fruits, medicinal plants, and other ancestral foods reconnects communities with Indigenous and African histories. Decolonizing Caribbean food also involves confronting the social hierarchies that treated European foods as prestigious while devaluing local crops and working-class cuisines.

Across Latin America, Indigenous food sovereignty is connected to territorial rights, resistance to mining and industrial agriculture, protection of native seeds, and the continued cultivation of foods adapted to local climates and ecosystems.

Asia, Palestine, India, and the Afterlives of Empire

Colonialism reshaped agriculture and cuisine across Asia through taxation, export production, famine policies, plantation economies, foreign concessions, racial hierarchies, and new systems of trade.

British colonial rule in India reorganized agricultural production and contributed to the commercialization and simplification of Indian cuisine abroad. The word “curry,” for example, has often been used to reduce thousands of regional dishes, ingredients, and culinary traditions to a single marketable category.

Decolonizing the representation of Indian food means restoring regional names, histories, languages, techniques, and distinctions. The revival of millets and other traditional crops also challenges agricultural systems that favor imported or industrially standardized foods.

Palestinian foodways demonstrate how cuisine can preserve memory, identity, agriculture, and relationships to place under occupation and displacement. Olive trees, grains, herbs, vegetables, home cooking, and family recipes carry histories that cannot be separated from land and political struggle.

Food may be used to assert ownership over culture or erase the people who developed it. At the same time, cooking, farming, seed saving, and culinary storytelling can become forms of resistance and cultural continuity.

Cultural Appropriation, Language, and Food Media

Food cultures have always changed through migration, trade, exchange, and adaptation. Decolonial criticism does not require cultures to remain isolated or prohibit people from cooking foods from other communities.

The central questions concern power, credit, ownership, representation, and economic benefit. Culinary exchange becomes exploitative when members of dominant groups present traditional foods as discoveries, erase their origins, stereotype the communities associated with them, or profit while the originating communities remain marginalized.

Food writers, restaurants, publishers, and companies can reduce harm by researching culinary history, naming dishes accurately, crediting sources, working with community experts, and avoiding claims that a borrowed recipe is more authentic or improved.

Language matters because broad labels such as “ethnic food,” “exotic,” or “curry” can flatten highly diverse traditions. Restaurant reviews and food media may also portray immigrant cuisines as cheap, unsophisticated, strange, or interchangeable while treating European cuisines as refined and worthy of higher prices.

Decolonizing food media requires changing who is able to write, publish, own restaurants, develop products, receive awards, and define culinary authority.

Challenges and Future Directions

Decolonizing food cannot be achieved by adding a few traditional ingredients to menus while leaving existing systems of land ownership and political power unchanged.

Meaningful change requires support for community control, land restoration, water rights, tribal governance, seed sovereignty, local processing facilities, culturally appropriate education, Indigenous research leadership, and equitable access to markets and funding.

Governments and institutions must move beyond consulting communities after decisions have already been made. Indigenous peoples and affected communities must have authority over policies involving their territories, foods, cultural knowledge, and biological resources.

Universities, museums, seed banks, restaurants, charities, and development organizations must also examine whether their work transfers power to communities or continues extractive relationships under the language of sustainability and inclusion.

Decolonization is not a single program or universal diet. Food systems differ across territories, cultures, climates, and histories. The people most closely connected to a food system must define what restoration, justice, sovereignty, and responsible exchange mean within their own communities.

Conclusion

Decolonizing food means recognizing that food is inseparable from land, history, culture, political authority, health, and ecological relationships. Colonial food systems displaced communities, suppressed knowledge, transformed diets, and concentrated control over land and production.

Food-sovereignty movements respond by restoring ancestral foods, returning seeds, rebuilding local agriculture, protecting water, reviving languages, strengthening community economies, and reclaiming authority over food decisions.

These movements demonstrate that traditional food knowledge is not merely a remnant of the past. It provides living strategies for cultural survival, environmental stewardship, public health, climate resilience, and community self-determination.

A decolonized food system is therefore not defined only by what appears on the plate. It is defined by who controls the land, who makes decisions, whose knowledge is respected, who receives the economic benefits, and whether communities can sustain their relationships with food for future generations.

Foundations and Decolonial Food-System Frameworks

Decolonize Your Food

| Slow Food Indigenous Peoples' Network | Slow Food | Accessed July 15, 2026

Introduces a global campaign protecting Indigenous and traditional foods from cultural loss and industrial displacement.

The Principles of Indigenous Food Sovereignty

| Dawn Morrison | UBC Farm | Accessed July 15, 2026

This widely used framework emphasizes sacredness, participation, self-determination, and supportive legislation for Indigenous food systems.

Decolonizing the Narrative of Indigenous Food Sovereignty

| Imen Sebai et al. | Current Developments in Nutrition | 2026

A scoping review presents Indigenous food sovereignty as a decolonizing framework grounded in self-determination, cultural continuity, ecological stewardship, and community authority.

The Six Pillars of Indigenous Food Sovereignty

| Native Food Alliance | Native Food Alliance | August 16, 2025

The framework emphasizes rematriating seeds, decolonizing food systems, restoring governance, and renewing responsibilities to land and water.

Indigenous Peoples' Right to Self-Determination: A Pathway for Food Security and Sovereignty

| International Federation of Social Workers | IFSW | August 7, 2025

The article links global Indigenous self-determination to community control of agriculture, food security, culture, and sustainable development.

The Principles of Indigenous Food Sovereignty

| UC Agriculture and Natural Resources | UC ANR | February 5, 2025

The article introduces principles including sacred relationships, participation, self-determination, and the promotion of culturally important foods.

Exploring Recipes of (De)colonization: A Scoping Review of Decolonization in Food-System Research

| Laura Hinton et al. | Agriculture and Human Values | 2025

A review maps how food-system scholars define decolonization, including the reclamation of Indigenous practices, resistance to colonial structures, and wider struggles for justice.

Indigenous Food Sovereignty: Literature Review

| Robert M. Hansell | Fourth World Journal | 2025

This literature review surveys health, law, gender, trade, seed saving, relationality, and anticolonial resistance within Indigenous food-sovereignty scholarship.

Indigenous Food Sovereignty: Pathways for Native Scholars

| M. C. K. Antonio et al. | Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development | 2025

Native scholars describe research and publishing pathways that support Indigenous communities in revitalizing food systems, languages, and knowledge.

Indigenous Peoples' Food Systems and Biocultural Heritage

| International Institute for Environment and Development | IIED | 2025

The paper proposes Indigenous-led, decolonial action research to protect food-related biocultural heritage from farm to plate.

The Future of Indigenous Food Sovereignty

| T. Hibbeler | University of Nebraska–Lincoln | 2025

A white paper reviews ecological, historical, institutional, and research challenges facing Indigenous control of food systems.

Indigenous Food Sovereignty

| Waapihk Research | Waapihk Research | September 27, 2024

An overview explains how restoring traditional food systems can decolonize diets, reclaim culture, strengthen communities, and improve health.

Food as a Weapon of Colonialism and Tool of Liberation

| Sarah Rotz et al. | Canadian Food Studies | 2024

Using Palestine and Turtle Island, the authors examine how food can be militarized by settler colonialism and reclaimed as a tool of liberation.

Seeding a Movement: Indigenous Food Sovereignty

| Mariaelena Huambachano | University of Miami Law Review | 2024

The article connects Indigenous cosmovisions, environmental justice, cultural rights, and food sovereignty as a basis for transformative law and policy.

NGOs and the Decolonisation of the Food System

| Welthungerhilfe | Global Food Journal | December 14, 2023

Asks how development organizations can shift power, resources, and decision-making toward communities in the Global South.

Indigenous Food Sovereignty

| Newberry Library staff | Newberry Library | January 4, 2023

An introduction to diverse Indigenous cuisines shaped by region, including corn, wild rice, berries, plants, buffalo, and deer.

Elements of Successful Food Sovereignty Interventions in Indigenous Communities

| Brenda V. Gutierrez et al. | Current Developments in Nutrition | 2023

A review identifies features that help community-led food-sovereignty projects address food insecurity and the continuing effects of colonial land loss.

Food Sovereignty as a Path to Health Equity for Indigenous Peoples

| Valarie Blue Bird Jernigan et al. | Current Developments in Nutrition | 2023

The authors explain how Indigenous food sovereignty can improve health equity by restoring relationships among communities, lands, foods, and living beings.

Framing an Indigenous Food Sovereignty Research Agenda

| Christina J. Nguyen et al. | Current Developments in Nutrition | 2023

This article identifies research priorities linking food sovereignty, health, land rematriation, native plants, governance, and Indigenous community leadership.

Impacts of Colonization on Indigenous Food Systems in Canada and the United States

| Arwa Malli et al. | BMC Public Health | 2023

The review traces disconnection from Indigenous food systems through capitalism, legal change, climate disruption, and sociocultural transformation.

Indigenous Food Systems and Food Sovereignty

| Suzanne Brant et al. | Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development | 2023

A collaborative conversation examines Indigenous food sovereignty as cultural revitalization, resistance to state power, and self-determination.

Reimagining Food Security Through Indigenous Food Sovereignty

| Natural Habitat Adventures | Good Nature Travel | November 14, 2022

The article surveys Native food-sovereignty practices that restore agriculture, reciprocity, community knowledge, and ecological responsibility.

Decolonizing Our Food Through Deep Medicine

| Slow Food | Slow Food | July 19, 2022

Rupa Marya connects food-system decolonization with ecological health, social relationships, and structural healing.

Food Justice Is Land Justice

| HEAL Food Alliance | HEAL Food Alliance | July 1, 2022

This essay links food justice to the colonial and racial history of land theft from Indigenous and Black communities.

Decolonizing Agriculture in the United States

| E. Layman and M. Civita | Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems | 2022

The authors challenge dominant agricultural narratives and call for land, labor, knowledge, and governance systems that center historically excluded growers.

Food Sovereignty, Justice and Indigenous Peoples

| Kyle Whyte | Oxford Handbook of Food Ethics | 2017

Whyte explains why collective self-determination over food systems is central to Indigenous justice under settler colonialism.

Indigenous Food Systems: Battling Whiteness Through Alternative Food Practices

| K. King | Inquiry@Queen's | 2016

The article explores how small-scale Indigenous food systems challenge whiteness within alternative-food spaces.

Decolonizing Food Justice: Naming, Resisting, and Researching Colonizing Forces in the Movement

| Megan M. Reynolds and Alison Hope Alkon | Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development | 2015

The article examines colonial power inside food-justice movements and emphasizes Black, Indigenous, feminist, and community-led frameworks.

Food Sovereignty as Decolonization

| Sam Grey and Raj Patel | Agriculture and Human Values | 2015

A foundational article argues that Indigenous food-sovereignty struggles continue anticolonial resistance and cannot be reduced to conventional food policy.

Decolonizing Diet: Healing by Reclaiming Traditional Indigenous Foodways

| Monica Bodirsky and Jon Johnson | Cuizine | 2008

This influential essay argues that reviving traditional food knowledge is essential to healing colonial trauma and improving Indigenous well-being.

Indigenous Food Sovereignty in North America

USDA Indigenous Food Sovereignty Initiative

| USDA Office of Tribal Relations | USDA | Accessed July 15, 2026

The initiative provides a comparative policy model for incorporating traditional foods, Indigenous markets, and culturally tailored nutrition into public programs.

The Indigenous Food Pyramid to Make Native America Healthy Again

| Levi Rickert and Cultivating Culture staff | Native News Online | May 19, 2026

An illustrated food pyramid examines federal nutrition policy through Indigenous food-sovereignty practices and relationships with ancestral foods.

Finding 'Big Wins' for Indigenous Food Systems

| Civil Eats Editors | Civil Eats | April 27, 2026

The interview describes how tribally controlled purchasing programs enabled communities to buy salmon, shellfish, berries, buffalo, and wild rice from Native producers.

Indigenous Chefs Championing Rise of Native Food

| Native News Online staff | Native News Online | January 12, 2026

Indigenous chefs discuss culinary creativity, traditional ingredients, and community control over food pathways.

Reclaiming That Power of Our Own Food

| ICT staff | ICT | December 25, 2025

Sean Sherman explains how normalizing traditional ingredients and building Indigenous food infrastructure can strengthen food sovereignty.

ICT Newscast: Chefs, Food Sovereignty and More

| ICT staff | ICT | November 27, 2025

The program highlights Native chefs, seasonal foods, farmers, wild onion traditions, and community-centered food sovereignty.

How to Build a Food Sovereignty Lab

| B. 'Toastie' Oaster | High Country News | September 15, 2025

Cal Poly Humboldt's Indigenous Foods Research Lab shows how universities can support homeland relationships, traditional foods, and Native-led research.

Indigenous Farm Connecting Young People with Land, Boosting Local Food Access

| Bella Davis | Native News Online | August 27, 2025

A Native farm links youth education, language, cultural traditions, and improved access to locally grown foods.

Trump's Funding Freeze of Indigenous Food Programs May Violate Treaty Law

| B. 'Toastie' Oaster | High Country News | March 31, 2025

The article explains how frozen federal grants threatened tribal food programs and raised questions about treaty and trust obligations.

For Siċaŋġu Nation, Taking Food Sovereignty Back Means Eating Climate-Friendly

| Grace Hussain | YES! Magazine | January 10, 2025

This feature describes how mushrooms, bison, and foraged plants combine ancestral knowledge with climate-conscious food practices.

Indigenous Food Systems Hold the Key to Breaking the Cycle of Malnutrition

| Anne Nuorgam and Yon Fernández-de-Larrinoa | Native News Online | December 3, 2024

The authors call for school meals and public policy that treat Indigenous recipes, farmers, and knowledge as central rather than marginal.

Part Two: Decolonizing Food Systems with Indigenous Practices and First Foods

| Oregon Food Bank | Oregon Food Bank | November 19, 2024

The article connects hunger and poverty to colonial dispossession and advocates restoring access to first foods, land, water, and air.

A Fight for Food Sovereignty

| Addie Roanhorse | ICT | February 6, 2024

Four Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota women revive seeds, community gardening, and traditional plant knowledge through the Unkožupi Project.

Tribes Are Building Food Sovereignty with Help from the Nation's Largest Hunger-Relief Group

| Kate Nelson | Civil Eats | October 31, 2023

Five tribal nations work with Feeding America to increase local production and strengthen disaster response while shifting control toward communities.

How Indigenous Nations Are Rebuilding Food Systems

| Native News Online staff | Native News Online | May 1, 2023

The article contrasts food security with sovereignty and highlights hunted, gathered, cultivated, and ceremonially shared foods.

When Food Is Much More Than a Commodity

| ICT staff | ICT | April 15, 2023

Tribal leaders describe food as cultural wealth, self-determination, and a living connection to ancestral teachings.

The Indigenous Winter Pantry: Recipes for Today's Kitchen

| Stephanie Woodard | YES! Magazine | February 8, 2023

The article presents recipes and tribal efforts to restore foods disrupted by colonization and reconnect kitchens with community knowledge.

Indigenous Food Sovereignty Movements Are Taking Back Ancestral Land

| Melissa Montalvo | Civil Eats | March 31, 2021

The feature follows tribal movements reclaiming fishing, grazing, salmon habitat, and access to ancestral lands.

Ending Food Insecurity in Native Communities Means Restoring Land Rights and Handing Back Control

| The Conversation | Native News Online | 2021

The article argues that Indigenous food sovereignty requires land rights, control of production, and reduced dependence on packaged and government foods.

Indigenous Food Security Is Dependent on Food Sovereignty

| Andi Murphy | Civil Eats | July 24, 2019

Research shows that access to ancestral lands for hunting, fishing, and foraging is essential to nourishment and cultural continuity.

Land, Seeds, Water, Buffalo, Salmon, and Manoomin

Harvesting Is an Act of Indigenous Food Sovereignty

| Shanai Matteson Reasons | Indigenous Environmental Network | Accessed July 15, 2026

Harvesting and parching manoomin is presented as a political, cultural, ecological, and community act of Anishinaabe sovereignty.

When the Buffalo Were Introduced to a Wind River Reservation School, Students Began to Thrive

| Levi Rickert and Cultivating Culture staff | Native News Online | May 12, 2026

A school buffalo program connects education, attendance, reading, food sovereignty, and cultural relationships with the Tatanka Oyate.

American Buffalo Return Home to Tribal Lands

| The Nature Conservancy | The Nature Conservancy | February 19, 2026

Large-scale buffalo transfers return animals to Native nations for ecological restoration, culture, nutrition, and sovereign herd management.

Manoomin: Wild Rice, Tribal Sovereignty and the Rights of Nature in Northern Minnesota

| Tim Lovett | Wild Ones Journal | December 30, 2025

The article examines manoomin as a sacred food, a treaty-protected relative, and a focus of tribal sovereignty and rights-of-nature advocacy.

Women-Led Bison Harvests Bring Tribal Food Sovereignty

| Native News Online staff | Native News Online | December 1, 2025

Women-led harvests join cultural education, community responsibility, intergenerational healing, and buffalo restoration.

Wild Rice Binds This Tribe Together. It's Under Threat from Every Direction

| Kimberley A. Martin | The Washington Post | October 6, 2025

The Bad River Band protects manoomin from climate change, invasive species, pollution, development, and pipeline threats.

Plants as Partners: Honoring the Personhood of Manoomin in Research and Restoration

| Mae Davenport et al. | AlterNative | August 27, 2025

Researchers and Anishinaabe communities frame wild rice as a living relative whose personhood should guide restoration and scholarship.

Aquaculture: Salmon, Sovereignty, and the Struggle for Respect

| Katie Maximick | SeaWestNews | June 21, 2025

First Nations leaders argue that salmon decisions must respect their rights, economies, territories, and food systems.

In Wyoming, the Eastern Shoshone Tribe Decided to Classify Buffalo as Wildlife

| Brittany Peterson | Associated Press | April 21, 2025

Classifying buffalo as wildlife rather than livestock strengthens cultural, ecological, and sovereign approaches to restoration.

How the Klamath Dams Came Down

| Grist staff | Grist | March 19, 2025

This multimedia history follows tribal resistance, salmon restoration, treaty rights, and the campaign that removed dams from the Klamath River.

How California's Salmon People Won the Restoration of Their Sacred Klamath River

| Corine Lesnes | Le Monde | June 16, 2024

Karuk, Yurok, and other tribes pursued dam removal to revive salmon, health, ceremony, and river-based life.

A Wildflower Is Teaching the Non-Native Public About Food Sovereignty

| B. 'Toastie' Oaster | High Country News | May 24, 2024

Oregon's Camas Festival teaches the public about tending, harvesting, reciprocity, and Indigenous responsibility toward a culturally important plant.

Oneida Farmstead at Center of Food Sovereignty Efforts

| Frank Vaisvilas | ICT | December 29, 2023

Ukwakhwa grows Haudenosaunee corn, beans, and squash while teaching tools, crafts, planting, processing, and community knowledge.

Indigenous Food Sovereignty and Manoomin

| University of Minnesota staff | University of Minnesota Institute on the Environment | December 15, 2023

A research reflection explores manoomin, climate adaptation, and the social and ecological dimensions of Indigenous food sovereignty.

Recent Study Highlights Benefits of Bison Restoration on Tribal Lands

| American Prairie staff | American Prairie | October 12, 2023

A summary of research highlights the cultural, ecological, conservation, and economic benefits of tribally led bison restoration.

Lake Superior Manoomin Cultural and Ecosystem Characterization Study

| H. R. Hosterman et al. | Ecology and Society | 2023

The study brings together cultural and ecological knowledge to better understand and protect Lake Superior manoomin.

The Indigenous Tribe Reviving Native Camas and the Prairies That Sustain It

| Grist staff | Grist | September 13, 2022

The Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe restores camas habitat through long-term stewardship, controlled burning, and ethical harvesting.

The Potential of Bison Restoration as an Ecological Approach to Future Tribal Food Sovereignty

| Hila Shamon et al. | Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution | January 28, 2022

Four tribal case studies show how buffalo restoration can support food sovereignty, conservation, culture, and sustainable economies.

How Indigenous Women Are Sharing Culture Through Seed Rematriation

| Keia Mastrianni | Saveur | December 3, 2021

Indigenous women return ancestral seeds to their communities, strengthening representation, cultural practice, biodiversity, and food security.

An Indigenous Food Sovereignty Initiative Is Positively Associated with Well-Being and Cultural Connectedness

| Rosanne Blanchet et al. | BMC Public Health | 2021

The Syilx-led restoration of Okanagan sockeye salmon is associated with harvesting, well-being, and stronger cultural connection.

Indigenous Chefs, Restaurants, and Culinary Revival

On Turtle Island, Indigenous Food Is Not the Past—It's the Future

| Sam O'Brien | Atlas Obscura | January 11, 2026

Sean Sherman discusses reclaiming Native foodways, rejecting colonial borders, and presenting Indigenous cuisine as innovative and future-facing.

The Blueprint for Indigenous Food Sovereignty Is Served at Owamni

| Levi Rickert | Native News Online | January 2026

A visit to Owamni considers how decolonized menus, Indigenous sourcing, employment, and public storytelling can become a model for food sovereignty.

Eating Indigenously: Award-Winning Chef Celebrates Native American Cuisine in New Cookbook

| The Guardian staff | The Guardian | November 23, 2025

Sherman's Turtle Island cookbook connects regional ingredients, cultural teachings, sustainable practices, and plans for Indigenous food infrastructure.

Sean Sherman Expands His Vision for Decolonizing the U.S. Food System

| Civil Eats Editors | Civil Eats | May 20, 2025

The chef and NATIFS founder expands restaurants, education, production, and food-lab projects rooted in precolonial ingredients.

Brunch, Decolonized

| Justine Jones | Eater Twin Cities | March 28, 2025

Owamni reimagines brunch without wheat, dairy, beef, pork, chicken, or cane sugar while supporting Indigenous ingredients and producers.

Where to Try Indigenous Foods in Colorado, From Mesquite Flour to Prickly Pear Popcorn

| Sarah Kuta | Food & Wine | November 22, 2024

Diné chef Narissa Ribera uses a grocery, kitchen, classes, and heirloom plant foods to strengthen Indigenous food knowledge and sovereignty.

It's Time to Build More Native Restaurants

| Nylah Iqbal Muhammad | Eater | September 2024

The essay argues that Native restaurants can expand economic opportunity, cultural visibility, producer networks, and public understanding of Indigenous cuisines.

Her Tribe Fed the Pilgrims. Here's What She Wants You to Know About Indigenous Food

| Melissa Chan | Time | November 17, 2022

Mashpee Wampanoag chef Sherry Pocknett uses seasonal East Coast foods to challenge Thanksgiving myths and showcase living Indigenous cuisine.

How Owamni Became the Best New Restaurant in the United States

| Carolyn Kormann | The New Yorker | September 12, 2022

A profile of Owamni explores decolonized cooking, Native sourcing, place, health, history, and the restaurant's national influence.

Embracing Traditional Foods Rejected by Centuries of Colonization

| Aliyah Chavez | ICT | 2022

Indigenous chefs and advocates reclaim ingredients and techniques long stigmatized or obstructed by colonial regulations and economic barriers.

Reviving Indigenous Food Cultures

| Ashley Rose Young | Smithsonian Magazine | November 24, 2021

Sean Sherman's work demonstrates how hyperlocal, seasonal foods can restore health, cultural memory, and food-system autonomy.

F&W Game Changers: Ancestral Connections

| Food & Wine Editors | Food & Wine | June 2021

The I-Collective brings together Native chefs, farmers, artists, and activists to revive foodways, build land access, and support Indigenous producers.

In Gather, Indigenous Food Sovereignty Is on the Menu

| Valerie Schloredt | YES! Magazine | November 25, 2020

A review of Gather follows chefs, farmers, and organizers using food to heal, build enterprises, and strengthen Native self-determination.

Can We Respectfully Celebrate Thanksgiving?

| Sonia Chopra | Bon Appétit | November 2020

A conversation around Gather considers truthful history, Indigenous producers, ethical sourcing, cultural foods, and the limits of conventional Thanksgiving.

Sean Sherman Is Decolonizing American Food

| Brenna Houck | Eater | September 1, 2020

Sherman explains how Indigenous Food Lab projects can rebuild culinary knowledge, food security, and community-controlled food businesses.

Gatherings Cafe

| Atlas Obscura staff | Atlas Obscura | April 13, 2020

The Minneapolis American Indian Center cafe centers Native ingredients while writing colonial foods out of the dominant story of Indigenous cuisine.

The Chef Bringing Native American Flavors to Communities in Need

| Luke Fater | Atlas Obscura | March 27, 2020

Diné chef Brian Yazzie challenges assumptions about frybread and uses precolonial foods in community meals and culinary education.

Serving Up Resilience: Indigenous Chefs Preserve Native Foodways—and Create New Ones

| Rachel Sanders | Bon Appétit | 2019

Indigenous chefs across Canada preserve wild foods and regional traditions while creating modern cuisines grounded in community and place.

This Indigenous Foods Activist Has a Message for Home Cooks

| Khushbu Shah | Food & Wine | 2019

Felicia Cocotzin Ruiz encourages Indigenous cooks to value ancestral plant knowledge, cultural foods, land relationships, and community healing.

How an Indigenous Chef Is Decolonizing Canadian Cuisine

| Dan Nosowitz | Atlas Obscura | August 3, 2018

Chef Rich Francis explains how colonial sugar, flour, and processed foods reshaped Indigenous palates and why culinary memory must be recovered.

Decolonizing Diet, Health, Nutrition, and Education

Food (In)security and Settler Colonialism: Weaponizing Starvation Against Indigenous Communities

| Utblick staff | Utblick | May 24, 2026

The essay examines how settler colonialism manufactures hunger by restricting subsistence, disrupting food values, and imposing dependence on state-controlled supplies.

Decolonizing Diets Workshop

| Valerie Segrest | Urban Indian Health Institute | 2025

A practical workshop explains how colonial food disruption contributed to chronic disease and how whole traditional foods can support healing.

Exploring Indigenous Food Sovereignty and Food Environments in Indigenous Communities in Canada

| F. Mobetty et al. | International Journal of Circumpolar Health | 2025

A scoping review analyzes interventions that reconnect First Nations, Inuit, and Métis communities with food systems, health, and culturally relevant environments.

An Indigenous Woman's Journey to Decolonize Her Diet

| Kate Nelson | Experience Life | May 7, 2024

A Tlingit writer describes healing her relationship with food by reconnecting with ancestral ingredients, identity, and community.

Hey, I Grew That: The Native American School That's Decolonizing Foodways

| Carey Gillam | The Guardian | March 7, 2024

The Umoⁿhoⁿ Nation school uses farming and culturally relevant meals to build youth confidence, heritage connections, food access, and health.

Eating Like the Ancestors

| Stephanie Woodard | YES! Magazine | November 30, 2023

Western Apache food traditions demonstrate how diverse cultivated and gathered foods supported health, strength, knowledge, and cultural continuity.

The Burden of Eating in America

| Karlos Baca | Eater | November 30, 2023

The essay critiques colonial ideas about nutrition and traces how Indigenous foods were displaced, demeaned, and separated from land and climate.

Decolonize Your Diet: Cookbook Review

| Each Green Corner staff | Each Green Corner | August 17, 2023

A review highlights plant-based Mexican American recipes that connect food, culture, history, and healing.

Feeding the Revolution: Claudia Serrato on Decolonizing Your Diet

| Madeleine Connors | Atmos | May 29, 2023

Culinary anthropologist Claudia Serrato describes eating precolonial ingredients and local produce as cultural repair and resistance.

Perspectives on Native Food Sovereignty and Health Equity

| First Nations Development Institute | First Nations Development Institute | April 2023

The report shows how cultural foodways, land access, identity, and tribally driven programs can reduce chronic-disease risks.

Confronting Colonialism in Canadian Dietetics Curricula

| S. Stein et al. | Canadian Journal of Dietetic Practice and Research | 2023

The authors examine how dietetics education can confront settler colonialism and its continuing effects on Indigenous nutrition and well-being.

Native Farm to School: Connecting Traditional Foods, Stories, Language, and Community

| First Nations Development Institute | First Nations Development Institute | 2022

This guide helps schools integrate Native foods, producers, language, stories, and community participation into education and meal programs.

What It Means to Decolonize Your Diet

| Foodwise staff | Foodwise | November 5, 2021

Luz Calvo and Catriona Rueda Esquibel discuss reclaiming Indigenous Mexican ingredients and treating food as medicine.

Meet Three Native Women Combining Powwow Dance with Other Types of Fitness

| Dennis Zotigh | Smithsonian Magazine | January 23, 2021

The article places contemporary Native wellness projects within the history of forced diet change, reservation confinement, and food sovereignty.

Promoting Traditional Foods for Human and Environmental Health

| A. Deaconu et al. | Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems | 2021

A global review links traditional food production and consumption to nutrition, biodiversity, environmental health, and cultural continuity.

Traditional Food Energy Intake among Indigenous Populations in High-Income Settler-Colonized Countries

| J. McCartan et al. | Current Developments in Nutrition | 2020

A systematic review examines dietary transitions away from traditional foods in settler-colonial states and their nutritional consequences.

Before You Try to Decolonize Your Diet, Read This

| Valerie Schloredt | YES! Magazine | August 24, 2018

A review connects Native health decline to ecological disruption, settler colonialism, immunity, nutrition, and historical trauma.

Decolonize Your Diet

| Valerie Schloredt | YES! Magazine | July 13, 2017

The piece introduces a plant-based Mexican American cookbook that recovers nopales, chayote, jicama, and other ancestral ingredients.

Decolonizing the Diet: Synthesizing Native-American History, Immunology, and Nutritional Science

| Gideon Mailer and Nicola Hale | Journal of Evolution and Health | 2013

The authors connect ruptures in Indigenous food systems after European colonization with changes in health, fertility, immunity, and nutrition.

Black Food Sovereignty and African Diaspora Foodways

Food Colonialism: Tracing Its Impact on Black Communities

| Project HEAL staff | Project HEAL | February 2, 2026

The article connects food colonialism to cultural erasure, economic exploitation, restricted access, diet culture, and healing in Black communities.

Black Food Sovereignty: Decolonizing the Food System

| Toronto Metropolitan University | Toronto Metropolitan University | December 2024

A panel links Black agrarianism, agroecology, abolition, land access, and food sovereignty to decolonization.

Judith Carney: Subsistence Farming of Enslaved Africans Creates African Foodways in the New World

| UCLA African Studies Center | UCLA | November 20, 2024

Geographer Judith Carney shows how enslaved growers used provision grounds to preserve African crops, knowledge, and foodways in the Americas.

Food, Power and the African Diaspora

| Conference Editors | Calenda | 2024

A research call surveys cultural, political, economic, and social questions surrounding African diaspora foodways and power.

Rooted in Justice: Global Voices on Food, Power, and Transformation

| Global Alliance for the Future of Food | Future of Food | 2024

A multimedia project presents ancestral recipes and food practices as sources of memory, resistance, healing, and community power.

Our Best Food Justice Stories of 2023

| Civil Eats Editors | Civil Eats | December 27, 2023

A collection highlights Black farmer funds, land access, Indigenous foodways, labor rights, and community-controlled food economies.

The Key for the Future: A Revolution for Food Security Built on Agroecological Farming Systems

| Slow Food | Slow Food | October 6, 2023

Argues that Africa's biodiverse agroecological traditions offer alternatives to imported industrial food models.

Six Black-Led Food Sovereignty Initiatives You Can Support

| Planet Women | Planet Women | June 9, 2022

The article profiles organizations using urban agriculture, education, land access, and mutual aid to challenge food apartheid.

Jessica B. Harris's Guide to Black Culinary History

| Dawn Davis | Bon Appétit | January 19, 2021

Culinary historian Jessica B. Harris recommends foods, books, restaurants, and traditions for understanding the African diaspora's culinary history.

African Diaspora Foodways in Social and Cultural Context

| Leslie W. Marshall et al. | Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development | 2021

The study examines how African-descended communities preserve identity, memory, survival strategies, and cultural relationships through food.

Imagination and Food in the Black Diaspora

| Rebecca Fils-Aimé | Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery | 2021

The paper explores how displaced Africans used memory, adaptation, exchange, and imagination to build new cuisines across the diaspora.

Soul Food: Pride and Prejudice

| Donna Battle Pierce | The Spruce Eats | 2021

The article distinguishes soul food as a Black cultural and political tradition from the broader regional label of Southern food.

Seeding Food Sovereignty: Black and Indigenous Farming and Land Justice

| Bioneers | Bioneers | December 3, 2020

Black and Indigenous leaders discuss land rematriation, cultural knowledge, farming, dignity, and food-sovereignty strategies.

The Colonial Language of White Food Culture

| Grounded Grub staff | Grounded Grub | July 3, 2020

The article critiques white food writers who claim to discover long-established foods while decentering the communities that created them.

Now List 2020: How Lazarus Lynch, Krista Scruggs, and Mayukh Sen Are Decolonizing the Food World

| them Editors | them | June 2020

Three queer food leaders address Black and immigrant culinary lineages, regenerative farming, media power, and representation.

Decolonizing Food: An Antidote to Oppression

| Womanly Magazine | Womanly Magazine | 2020

The essay presents ancestral food knowledge, diaspora cuisines, cultural exchange, health, and policy change as tools against oppression.

Culinary Imperialism and the Hierarchies of Food

| Rasna Warah | The Elephant | September 27, 2019

The essay shows how colonial rule in Africa used food to impose social hierarchies, cultural standards, and ideas of civilization.

The Unbearable Taste: Early African American Foodways

| Michael W. Twitty | Commonplace | 2018

Twitty traces how enslaved Africans preserved tastes, textures, seasonings, crops, and healing practices under brutal conditions.

Foodways of Enslaved Laborers on French West Indian Plantations

| Benoît Bérard et al. | Afriques | 2014

Archaeological and historical evidence shows how enslaved people created food systems for survival and cultural continuity in the French Caribbean.

Hawaiian, Pacific, Māori, and Aboriginal Food Sovereignty

New Study Finds Colonisation Driving Food Insecurity for Māori

| University of Auckland | University of Auckland | February 10, 2026

Researchers connect Māori food insecurity to loss of whenua, restricted mahinga kai, weakened rangatiratanga, and the marginalization of mātauranga Māori.

Colonisation Is a Determinant of Food Insecurity

| M. Shelling et al. | Kōtuitui | 2026

Māori researchers identify land loss, restrictions on harvesting and sharing, marginalized knowledge, and stigma as colonial drivers of food insecurity.

Māori Food Sovereignties, Positionality and Mana Motuhake

| H. Rapata et al. | Lowitja Journal | 2026

The article examines how colonial power and race shape Māori food, nutrition, terminology, positionality, and self-determination.

Aboriginal Plant Foods Policy in Australia

| J. McCartan et al. | International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food | 2025

A policy analysis asks how Australian governments regulate Aboriginal plant foods and whether Indigenous rights and knowledge are adequately protected.

Hāloa: The Long Breath of Hawaiian Sovereignty, Water, and Food

| P. Apoliona-Brown et al. | Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development | 2025

Native Hawaiian-led land and water protection reveals food practice as survivance and resistance to settler-colonial systems.

Integrating Australian Native Foods for a More Sustainable Food System

| C. V. A. Lopes et al. | Nutrients | 2025

The study reviews benefits and barriers to integrating native Australian foods while emphasizing sustainability, nutrition, culture, and Indigenous participation.

Explainer: What Is Food Sovereignty and What Can It Look Like in Our Communities?

| NITV staff | SBS NITV | March 12, 2024

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices explain food sovereignty as survival, reclamation, cultural nutrition, health, and community control.

How Traditional Hawaiian Food Is Playing a Key Role in Wildfire Recovery

| Gabrielle Canon | The Guardian | February 21, 2024

Maui organizations use kalo, breadfruit, local agriculture, and community distribution to support recovery and reduce dependence on imports and tourism.

Māori Kai Sovereignty to Achieve Food Security

| Nick Roskruge | Proceedings of the Nutrition Society | 2024

The article describes kai sovereignty as an intergenerational relationship among food, knowledge, identity, land, and Māori well-being.

The Trees Arrived with Polynesian Voyagers. After Maui Wildfire, There's a Chance to Restore Them

| Jennifer Sinco Kelleher | Associated Press | December 2023

Community members preserve and propagate ulu and kukui as culturally important foods and symbols in Lahaina's rebuilding.

Food Laborers as Stewards of Island Biocultural Diversity

| A. Marrero et al. | Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems | 2023

The article centers food laborers' knowledge in reversing island losses of nutrition, agrobiodiversity, and self-determination.

Support Pacific Neighbours by Strengthening Indigenous Food Systems

| Jane Alver and Steven Ratuva | Lowy Institute | July 26, 2022

The authors argue that Pacific aid and climate policy should strengthen food systems refined over centuries rather than impose external models.

Aquaponics Opens the Door to Indigenous Food Security

| Breanna Draxler | YES! Magazine | May 31, 2022

Native Hawaiian aquaponics projects combine new technology with community values, household food production, health, and ancestral responsibility.

Hawaiian Foodways Are Vanishing. Chef Brian Hirata Won't Let That Happen

| Megan Zhang | Bon Appétit | 2022

Chef Brian Hirata forages native ingredients and teaches diners about place-based knowledge, environmental care, and disappearing Hawaiian foodways.

Here's the Difference Between Hawai'i's Local Food and Hawaiian Food

| Kiki Aranita | Food & Wine | 2022

A personal history distinguishes Indigenous Hawaiian cuisine from local plantation-era foods shaped by colonialism, migration, war, and canned commodities.

Food, Work and Sovereignty

| Rebecca L. Spence | The Sociological Review | October 19, 2020

The essay uses a food-sovereignty lens to examine hunger, work, colonial enclosure, and the destruction of Aboriginal food landscapes in remote Australia.

Frontiers of Taste: Food Sovereignty, Sustainability and Indigenous-Settler Relations in Australia

| Zane Ma Rhea | Springer | 2017

This book-length study traces how colonial relations shaped Australian food security, taste, sustainability, and Indigenous-settler interactions.

The Relationship Between Food Sovereignty and Hawaiian Health: The Implications of Island Food Systems

| Katrina-Ann R. Kapā'anaokalāokeola Nākoa Oliveira Correa | Indiana Health Law Review | 2017

A legal analysis links Hawaiian land rights, public health, cultural integrity, and sovereign food systems.

Understanding Māori Food Security and Food Sovereignty Issues in Whakatāne

| T. Moeke-Pickering et al. | MAI Journal | 2015

A Māori-led pilot study explores food security and sovereignty through community experiences, relationships, and cultural frameworks.

Caribbean, Latin American, and Puerto Rican Food Decolonization

Colonization, Food, and the Practice of Eating

| Food Empowerment Project | Food Empowerment Project | Accessed July 15, 2026

The essay reviews how Spanish colonization transformed land, livestock, crops, labor, and Indigenous eating practices.

Food Sovereignty for Self-Determination and Decolonization

| Stronger Caribbean Together | Stronger Caribbean Together | Accessed July 15, 2026

The essay argues that Caribbean autonomy requires locally defined, culturally appropriate, ecologically sustainable food and agriculture systems.

Barter and Hierarchy: Food, Society, and Knowledge in the Inca Empire

| Luis-Felipe Arizmendi | arXiv | April 22, 2025

The paper examines Inca food production, redistribution, cooperation, and knowledge transmission beyond money-centered economic models.

With Cassava Inscribed on UNESCO's Heritage List, Rural Caribbean Communities See a Bright Future

| Le Monde with AFP | Le Monde | January 2, 2025

Caribbean communities celebrate cassava bread as a living connection to Indigenous and African heritage, rural livelihoods, and regional identity.

Caribbean Food Is Powerful Enough to Be a Peacemaker

| Tenille Clarke | Teen Vogue | June 2024

The feature presents Caribbean dishes as bearers of colonial history, migration, family memory, comfort, and social connection.

Security of Indigenous Guatemalan Agriculture amid Social and Climate Uncertainty

| Julien Malard-Adam et al. | arXiv | March 28, 2024

Participatory modeling with Indigenous communities in Guatemala explores climate pressures, local policy options, crops, and food security.

Food Sovereignty and Indigenous World-Building: Cultivando Comunidad

| Viviana Saldaña and Marisol de la Cadena | ReVista | April 18, 2023

The essay connects Indigenous cultivation across Abya Yala and the Caribbean to community survival amid extraction, privatization, and dispossession.

How El Departamento de la Comida Fights Colonialism Through Food

| Arielle Cruz | them | 2022

Puerto Rican organizers build seed libraries, kitchens, solar infrastructure, farmer networks, and agroecology to reduce colonial import dependence.

Wrestling with Race and Colonialism in Caribbean Agriculture

| T. Barry et al. | Geoforum | 2020

The article examines plantation legacies, race, neoliberal agriculture, and struggles over production and power in the Caribbean.

Decolonizing the Caribbean Diet

| V. G. Polanco | Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development | 2019

A reflective essay connects Caribbean diet decolonization with Indigenous foodways, food as medicine, and culturally grounded health.

Hurricane María: An Agroecological Turning Point for Puerto Rico?

| Georges Félix and Eric Holt-Giménez | Food First | Winter 2017

Examines how Puerto Rico's agroecology movement links disaster recovery, food sovereignty, and decolonization.

Asia, Palestine, India, and the Afterlives of Empire

Food as the Language of Occupation

| SHADO | SHADO | October 6, 2025

Explores how food can carry love and belonging while also becoming a weapon of occupation, erasure, and war.

What's Not on the Plate? Rethinking Food Computing Through Indigenous Indian Datasets

| Pamir Gogoi et al. | arXiv | September 19, 2025

Critiques digital food datasets that flatten India's Indigenous cuisines and proposes more culturally grounded approaches.

A Palestinian Chef's Quest to Preserve His Heritage, One Dish at a Time

| The Guardian | The Guardian | July 17, 2025

Profiles Sami Tamimi's effort to preserve Palestinian food memory and agricultural knowledge through cooking.

Feeding Empire: The Impact of Colonialism on Indian Food Practices and Agriculture

| Shabeermon M. | International Journal for Multidisciplinary Research | March–April 2025

Reviews how British rule reshaped Indian agriculture, diets, trade, famine vulnerability, and culinary hierarchies.

A Taste of Resistance

| Sussex Global | University of Sussex | February 14, 2025

Considers Palestinian food as a practice of memory, identity, survival, and resistance to dispossession.

Beyond Curry: Decolonising the Way We Talk About Indian Food

| Divya Ravindranath | Goya | January 21, 2025

Challenges the colonial shorthand of 'curry' and calls for language that respects India's regional culinary diversity.

How Shanghai's Western Food Became a Cuisine All Its Own

| Financial Times | Financial Times | January 17, 2025

Traces how Shanghai cooks transformed foods introduced through foreign concessions into a distinctive local cuisine.

Cuisine as a Site of Palestinian Resilience

| Le Monde | Le Monde | December 8, 2024

Shows how Palestinian cuisine preserves place, family history, and national identity amid displacement.

How Colonialism Has Affected Southeast Asian Cuisine

| Southeast Asia in the Media | Lehigh University | October 17, 2024

Surveys the lasting culinary effects of European conquest, trade, plantation economies, and migration in Southeast Asia.

Grief, Solidarity, and Molokhia

| Eater Chicago | Eater | August 22, 2024

Examines how molokhia connects Palestinian and Egyptian communities through grief, solidarity, and cultural continuity.

Food and the Transmission of Culture: Linking Past, Present, and Future

| C. D. Nasser | Jerusalem Quarterly | 2024

Explains how Palestinian food knowledge transmits history and identity across generations and displacement.

The Revival of Forgotten Millets in Jharkhand, India

| Slow Food | Slow Food | October 15, 2023

Documents efforts to revive Indigenous millet cultivation after decades of decline under industrial agricultural policy.

India, Curry and Europe: A Case of Culinary Colonialism

| M. Joseph | Swansea University | 2023

Analyzes how European ideas of 'curry' condensed and commercialized India's diverse cuisines.

The Burden of Colonial Gastronomy: Stories from West Bengal

| Sayan Dey | Research in Hospitality Management | 2021

Though centered in Bengal, this article offers a comparative decolonial method for understanding food stigma, littoral cuisines, and colonial hierarchies relevant across former colonies.

The Aftertaste of Empire: Food and Decolonization

| American Historical Association | Perspectives on History | September 2016

Introduces food as a revealing lens on empire, independence, national identity, and the unfinished work of decolonization.

Analysis of Food Pairing in Regional Cuisines of India

| Anupam Jain et al. | arXiv | May 5, 2015

Demonstrates the complexity of India's regional cuisines and resists treating Indian food as a single uniform tradition.

Spices Form the Basis of Food Pairing in Indian Cuisine

| Anupam Jain et al. | arXiv | February 12, 2015

Uses recipe data to show how spice combinations structure Indian cuisines beyond familiar Western pairing assumptions.

Yotam Ottolenghi and the Authors of The Gaza Kitchen Discuss Food, Conflict, and Culture

| Bon Appétit | Bon Appétit | 2013

A conversation about Gaza's home cooking, political conditions, culinary memory, and the ethics of representing Palestinian food.

Food Culture in Colonial Asia: A Taste of Empire

| Cecilia Leong-Salobir | University of Wollongong | 2011

Examines how colonial households, servants, migration, and racial hierarchy produced hybrid food cultures across Asia.

Cultural Appropriation, Food Media, Language, and Representation

We're Having the Wrong Conversation About Food and Cultural Appropriation

| Paste Magazine | Paste | Accessed July 15, 2026

Redirects attention from policing ingredients toward labor, ownership, economic justice, and who benefits from culinary trends.

I Called My Recipe Book Sabzi. Then a US Company Tried to Trademark the Word

| Yasmin Khan | The Guardian | December 4, 2025

Uses a trademark dispute over a widely shared South Asian word to examine ownership, language, and culinary power.

Cultural Crossroads: A Retrieval-Augmented Framework for Understanding Food Across Cultures

| Tianyi Hu et al. | arXiv | July 29, 2025

Proposes technology designed to interpret culturally specific foods without erasing their historical and social contexts.

Accused of Cultural Appropriation: My Journey with Indo Cuisine

| The Indo Project | The Indo Project | March 25, 2025

Reflects on diaspora identity, mixed heritage, authority, and responsibility when presenting Indo food traditions.

Food for Thought? The Cultural Appropriation of Food in Contemporary Media

| Jonathan Eddy | ResearchGate | 2025

Studies how contemporary media frames culinary borrowing, authenticity, race, and cultural ownership.

Appreciation or Appropriation?

| Institute of Food Technologists | Food Technology Magazine | November 6, 2023

Offers food professionals a framework for distinguishing respectful exchange from exploitative culinary appropriation.

Decolonize Your Food: The Slow Food Indigenous Peoples' Network Campaign Against Food Heritage Loss

| Slow Food Indigenous Peoples' Network | Slow Food | August 9, 2023

Calls on consumers and institutions to protect Indigenous food heritage, biodiversity, languages, and community control.

Othering and Low-Status Framing of Immigrant Cuisines in Online Restaurant Reviews

| Yiwei Luo et al. | arXiv | July 14, 2023

Finds linguistic patterns that exoticize immigrant cuisines and reproduce social hierarchies in restaurant reviews.

Yes, Culinary Appropriation Is Real

| Anjali Prasertong | Anjali Ruth | 2023

Argues that culinary exchange becomes appropriation when power, credit, profit, and historical context are ignored.

Cultural Appropriation in Food and History

| Nomad Cook | Nomad Cook | June 7, 2021

Places modern culinary appropriation debates in a longer history of conquest, trade, migration, and unequal exchange.

How to Avoid Cultural Appropriation in Food Writing

| Dianne Jacob and Nandita Godbole | Dianne Jacob | April 27, 2021

Provides practical guidance for researching, crediting, naming, and contextualizing recipes from cultures not one's own.

Food Cultural Appropriation: It's Personal

| The Cornell Daily Sun | The Cornell Daily Sun | March 25, 2021

Connects debates over borrowed cuisines to personal histories of migration, racism, belonging, and family food.

What Is Cultural Appropriation?

| Mallika Basu | Mallika Basu | 2021

Explains how power and unequal recognition shape the boundary between culinary appreciation and appropriation.

C Is for Colonialism's Effect on How and What We Eat

| Food52 | Food52 | February 21, 2020

Links contemporary food trends and culinary appropriation to colonial histories of extraction and cultural hierarchy.

Culinary Cultural Appropriation: How Can You Identify It?

| Adán Medrano | Adán Medrano | 2020

Identifies appropriation in food businesses through patterns of erasure, decontextualization, profit, and unequal authority.

Making Our Recipes Better

| Joey Hernandez | Bon Appétit | 2020

Describes an institutional audit of recipe naming, attribution, stereotyping, and the magazine's treatment of global cuisines.

Easy, Peasy, Japanese-y: Benihana and the Question of Cultural Appropriation

| Sho Spaeth | Serious Eats | February 13, 2019

Uses Benihana to examine performance, authenticity, assimilation, and American commercial representations of Japanese food.

Fights Over Authentic Chinese Food Reveal the Politics of Cultural Appropriation

| TIME | TIME | 2019

Explores why claims of authenticity and ownership become politically charged when Chinese food is marketed by outsiders.

Other People's Food: Preliminary Thoughts

| Rachel Laudan | Rachel Laudan | June 2, 2017

Considers the long history of culinary borrowing while asking how power changes the ethics of exchange.

I Still Don't Understand the Cultural Appropriation of Food

| Food Republic | Medium | 2017

Presents a skeptical view of culinary appropriation and illustrates the tensions surrounding ownership of recipes and cuisines.