#86 Sharon Gardner on re-rooting Afro-Caribbean ‘veganism’, food justice and body re-connection
“Being from a Jamaican heritage, we’ve had the Ital movement that has been around for 100 years and we’ve had the Rastafarians following this for 100 years, but they get no recognition when it comes to the vegan movement. I feel that we shouldn’t villanise anyone for the choices they make, just educate them, raise the awareness, and give them choices. The options there if you want it, and this is how you can do it. That’s why I love teaching, because I’m able to show people how to create the dishes like jerk jackfruit. Everyone loves a jerk, so jerking up some jackfruit for them to try, it’s so meaty but it’s from a fruit!”
With increasing awareness of the environmental and health benefits of plant-based food practices, what power does re-rooting the values of the western vegan movement hold in tending to the generational wound of food injustices for BIPOC communities? How can we begin to trace ancestral ways of cooking to build more sustaining connections to the land and our bodies, whilst retaining the stories and flavours of our homelands?
We ground these questions in this episode with Sharon Gardner, a plant-based nutritionist, a cookery school teacher, and the founder of Core of Life (UK), and Wholistic Wellness with Sharon. She holds a Degree in Health Sciences and also holds a diploma in teaching Pilates, which she uses as a tool to teach people how to use their body, so that it benefits them in their everyday life. Her work involves supporting individuals on their wellness journeys through facilitating and empowerment. As a plant-based chef and holistic wellness practitioner with Caribbean heritage, Sharon loves to share her knowledge and story through infusing the “vegan flavours of the Caribbean” in the dishes she creates and shares with all those she has the pleasure of working with.
What will be covered:
Issues around symptom-based healthcare not addressing root causes of health issues & normalising common conditions e.g. painful periods, hay fever, migraines, sun allergies
Holistic wellness centring the body as a whole instead of fragmenting the body system
Sharon’s journey from one-to-one support as a naturopath and nutritionist to supporting multiple people from different backgrounds/cultures through her cooking classes in the Made in Hackney school
Re-rooting our food cultures to traditional plant-based ways of cooking and connecting to nature through food prior to dominant colonial understanding of power, status and nutrition e.g. Ital movement, Rastafarian diets
Re-creating flavours and textures of cultural dishes without meat being a testament to what we can make with plants
Tensions around what “traditional” means for communities from colonies, particularly the Caribbean islands and the mixing of cultures during enslavement - reclaiming the beauty held in the diversity in post-colonial cultures
Addressing tensions between vegan and non-vegan communities through a place of compassion and understanding
Intergenerational dialogue on re-rooting diets to ancestral plant-based food practices through intergenerational knowledge exchanges in cooking classes
Food injustices needing to be addressed at the school level to form solid foundations for healthy eating for children
Disconnect between the body and land through the commercialisation of fresh produce - systemic programming that only allows us to see ‘packaged’ food as fit to eat rather than handpicked produce
Tuning into the body to understand signals which can allow us to better meet its needs as a way of shifting away from symptom-focused healthcare
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Mind Full of Everything is a podcast calling for the radical healing of the self and community to outgrow the broken dominant culture of radical individualism and disconnection from our place as interdependent beings, so that we can collectively re-envision a safer, healthier and equitable world. Each episode takes a healing-centric approach to explore the embodied ways in which we can collectively restore and transform our journeys as stewards of community and earth through conversations with writers, researchers, coaches and educators, as well as reflection episodes with the host Agrita Dandriyal on her journey navigating the world as a deeply conscious, culturally-rooted and relational being. Learn more here.
