No More Auction Block For Me: On The Dangers of Colonized Minds in Capitalist Society

Cee Knowledge of Digable Planets, Sistah Vegan, DJ Cavem Moetavation at Brown Suga Festival in Denver on April 28 2012. Keynote speaker: A. Breeze Harper (aka Sistah Vegan)

Video recording of Breeze Harper’s April 28 2012 keynote address for the Brown Suga Youth Festival in Denver, Colorado. ATTENTION: THERE ARE 3 PARTS. SCROLL DOWN FOR PARTS II & III.

Part I (47 minutes)

This is the keynote lecture I gave for the April 28 2012 Denver, Colorado “Brown Suga Youth Festival”.  I talk about solidarity, decolonizing our minds, being aware of the dangers of capitalism on our minds, veganism, non-human animals suffering, food justice, and health activism. The first 9 minutes are introductions from the husband wife duo Naembe and Ietef, who put the festival together. I start speaking about 9 minutes into the video. There are 3 parts to this. The last is the q & a.

Part II (12 minutes)

Part III (The Question and Answer section: 11 minutes)

I want you to notice that Ietef and Naembe are both carrying babies. This event was something I could attend because they support folk with very young children. Naembe is carrying my infant daughter and Ietef is carrying their infant daughter as well. They made it possible to bring out my whole family, which is important for us because I nurse on demand. It is a true display of honoring “nursing on demand” as a food justice issues.  I thank them for that. I also thank Ashara, Ietef’s mother, who introduces me. I thank her for her spirit and for birthing such a wonderful man who is pro-vegan and pro-green, and just an overall awesome human spirit.The talk is more like a “songversation” . I sing and have a conversation directed towards youth, about the top 5 things I wish someone had told me when I was a youth. I wanted more help to decolonize my mind in regards to food and health, while trying to understand how capitalism has affected all of our minds, here in the USA.

I am inspired by Angela Davis’s Social Justice Teach-in Keynote speech that she gave in February 2012, at the University of California, Davis.

This Brown Suga Youth Festival was awesome. All about hip hop culture fuse with teaching youths about wellness, health, food!! It was pro-vegan and we had poetry slam, a panel discussion, break dance lessons, free vegan food samples (Thanks Lisa Shapiro), awesome art work, and a lot of youths! It was the 9th year of this festival.

Sistah Vegan Product Review: Seasnax, great for toddlers!

In this short video I review the vegan and non-gmo product, Seasnax.

You can purchase it here:

amazon.com/​gp/​product/​B004WZ4EIS/​ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=sistvegawebs-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399373&creativeASIN=B004WZ4EIS

And more about NON GMO project:
nongmoproject.org/​

 

 

Sistah Vegan and “Old McDonald Had a Farm [Sanctuary]“

In this video I talk about my experience at the recent 2011 San Francisco world Veg Festival, Food Empowerment Project , my ideas about a vegan friendly nursery rhyme, updates about my funding for my dissertation , and other stuff going on in my life.

Food Empowerment Project: http://foodispower.org/

The video above talks about my funding project in brief, updating you on my campaign to get enough money to finish my dissertation: Below is the video that I recorded this past summer that talks more about this.

 

 

 

 

 

Why vegan activism can’t be ‘race-neutral’: Afua’s race conscious veganism

I speak about how Queen Afua has a black female racialized-sexualized consciousness around veganism. She is “race-conscious” and I speak about how the top 100 selling vegan diet books  on Amazon.com don’t engage in a ‘race-conscious’ approach to veganism, but a ‘post-racial’ non-classed conscious approach. Yet this lack of racial consciousness and class consciousness IMPLIES that it’s for ‘normal’ population. Read ‘normal’ as default white middle class

I also break down the first 40 pages of Afua’s book, “City of Wellness” and analyze it as part of my dissertation work, which looks at revolutionary black female vegan activists who are ‘race-conscious’ with their activism.
The City of Wellness: Restoring Your Health Through the Seven Kitchens of Consciousness

Race, Constructing the Nation, and Some Food For Thought

I am currently reading the book Constructing the Nation: A Race and Nationalism Reader by Ortega and Alcoff. It just came out. It’s a book of critical essays on understanding race and nation, post-9/11.

Below I have an MP3 podcast of me talking about the book and how it relates to food and my food studies research endeavors. I speak about how my parents expressed worry about me because I wanted to expose the harm that corporate capitalist driven food industry does to the people in the USA. Click on this link to listen to the 7 minute long audio of me talking about this: Constructing the Nation

Vegan Valentine Chocolate Idea: Coracao Confections

I went to the Berkeley Farmer’s Market yesterday. For you chocolate lovers, I ‘d recommend http://www.coracaoconfections.com/theingredients.html . They had a new stand there. They are right down the street from me in Emeryville, CA. They had the best raw chocolate fudge I’ve ever tasted. They also had a vegan caramel covered in chocolate .The caramel was made from yacon and it was fantastic.

Caramel Chocolates

(pic source: http://nsxwv.uyjyb.servertrust.com/PhotoGallery.asp?ProductCode=P%2DCM1)

All their ingredients are vegan and organic. I had a coconut cashew yacon blondie dipped in chocolate. It was fantastic!  I thought this would be a great idea to let people know about this– especially if they are looking for Valentine’s day treats that are organic, vegan, and a small business.

hugs
Breeze

If You Can’t Stand Raw, Get out of the Restaurant.

I enjoy eating a variety of foods and have a number of cuisines that top my list, but I’m not real big on 100% raw food diets.  To each their own, but much can be said about how regional changes in climate and seasonal availability of locally sourced ingredients play a role in our health and wellbeing.

Last year a friend and I stopped by a raw food restaurant in Brooklyn. We’d just finished a sinfully good dessert brunch at a great but now closed raw food restaurant a couple of neighborhoods away, but had heard about a family day event they were hosting and decided to check it out.

After balking at the $35/adult entry fee (for a family event? WTF) we decided to go check out the restaurant instead.  I decided on a “flatbread” and dip-like appetizer. The “flatbread” wasn’t sure if  it wanted to be crackers, bread, or biscuits, but succeeded at tasting awful and being incompatible with the flavor of the dip (which was good).

While we were sitting there, taking in the atmosphere, the host (and maybe the owner), a beautiful and glowing brown beauty, noticed that I hadn’t touched the crackers (which outnumbered the dip, btw) and asked us about our meal. When I replied that I didn’t like taste of the ‘crackers”, she exclaimed, “You don’t like them? You must not be into raw food…This is my FAVORITE dish!” We exchanged a few more words about plant-based diets, and my companion and I spent the rest of our (his) meal snarking about what the she could do with her FAVORITE meal (remove it from my sight and eat it herself).

Yesterday, I had lunch with a few members of Black Vegetarian Society of NY at a raw food restaurant in Harlem. I have enjoyed a number of the dishes I’ve had there previously, although I’ve grown tired of veg*n and raw interpretations of SAD cuisine. I also don’t quite understand the value in spending hours dehydrating a food you just spent hours soaking because it’s supposed to be better for you that way. Really?

Three of us ordered a bowl of marinated greens. I had ordered mine first, which, after sampling, the other two decided they wanted their own order.

Their greens were swimming in the marinade, to which I wondered aloud if it was simply because they’d gotten the last of the greens and it wasn’t drained out.

One of my lunch companions decided to bring it up to the chef.

When the chef/owner came out, the member complimented him on an overall great meal, but had a problem finishing the greens because of how much marinade was in the bowl – overwhelming the greens.

And his following response is partly the reason why people don’t complain directly to owners, instead choosing their friends or the interwebs and costing the business unknown financial losses.

The chef/owner politely informed us that the marinated greens were SUPPOSED to have all the juice with it, that it was part of the healthiness of the juice (like pot likker?).  He then went on to say that a lot of people come in not knowing what to expect from raw food and the next day look at their poop and exclaim, “Is that what just came out of me?!” and promptly share the news with their friends.  Then we got an education about how healthy and better it is to eat this way (uncooked and dehydrated foods).

We laughed about the defensiveness of raw food chefs and finished our meal. Not too long after that, we were asked to leave as the restaurant was approaching their peak hours and needed the tables. It was just after 3 o’clock. The only other customer in the restaurant ordered to go. A big snowstorm was about to hit NYC.

What’s the moral of this story? 1. I observed that I was more thirsty during this raw meal than when I make my own uncooked meals (whole food juices, smoothies, salads, and other non-dehydrated dishes) 2. You need to be qualified as a raw foodist before you can criticize a dish.

No Alligator for Me, Thanks.

I visited with my mother today.

When I arrived, she and a neighbor were sitting on the stoop.

At some point, the conversation went into Chinese people eating cats and dogs, and other cultures eating alligator and monkey; this repulsed the two of them.

They had chicken for dinner.

Food review: Two Moms in the Raw Granola

The other day, Oliver, my husband, bought a new raw granola cereal to try out. He had been eating Lydia’s raw cereal for about a year now and had been enjoying it, but wanted to try something new. I am not a big Lydia’s cereal fan (but I love those bars!), as I find it too dry. Oliver ended up getting a raw Gojiberry cereal from the company Two Moms in the Raw . He kept on asking me to “give it a try” for about 48 hours. I kept on declining, assuming that it would be “too dry”.

Well, yesterday morning I finally gave it a try and you know what?
It was FANTASTIC! I am eating it now as I type. It is perfectly moist with crunchy pieces of perfectly sprouted and dehydrated millet. Other ingredients in the Gojiberry cereal are Millet, Buckwheat, Coconut, Flaxseed, Sunflower Seeds, Seasame Seeds, Pecans, Almonds, Pepitas, Apples, Agave, Cinnamon, Sea Salt and Gojiberries.

I give this cereal 4.5 out of 5 stars. The -.5 deduction comes from the fact that I think it’s a little too sweet, so I can’t really eat a lot of it in a cereal bowl without feeling like I’m going into Agave Nectar “sugar shock”. The price is also quite high ($10 if you order online). It’s a small company and their food is organic, raw, and vegan, so I do understand that their prices will be higher than a box of Cheerios (but far healthier of course). This does make me sad when I realize how mostly class privileged individuals, such as myself, can really only afford raw foods that are pre-packaged at $10 a pop.

All and all, I am thankful that Two Moms in the Raw created a raw cereal that I find moist and crunchy! Thanks!