EVENT RECAP | Listen Up! Understanding Food Justice and Environmental Justice through Music
On April 14, 2022, the Tishman Center collaborated with the New School’s Food Studies program to host “Listen Up! Understanding Food Justice and Environmental Justice through Music” as part of our Earth Week events and Food Studies’ “Critical Food Studies and Social Justice” series.
Born from a mutual love of music, moderators Dr. Kristin Reynolds (chair of the Food Studies program) and Mike Harrington (assistant director of the Tishman Center) hoped for this online panel to explore how music is tied with such diverse fields as food justice and environmental justice. The event featured four panelists:
Lyla June, Indigenous musician, scholar and community organizer
Bryant Terry, James Beard & NAACP Image Award-winning chef, educator, and author
Dr. Thomas RaShad Easley, certified diversity, equity and inclusion consultant, musical artist, educator, and Founder and CEO of Mind Heart for Diversity, LLC
Dr. Tanya Kalmonovitch, musician, scholar, author, and Associate Professor of Music Entrepreneurship at The New School
The panelists discussed questions such as how their work contributes to broader recognition of non-Eurocentric knowledges and communication and how they integrate food and environmental justice with music, highlighting these connections through samples of their work. This diverse mix of pieces included Lyla June’s All Nations Rise, RaShad Easley’s Country Mansions, Bryant Terry’s collaboration with Stella Artois celebrating black-eyed peas as a symbol of the African diaspora, and the trailer for Tanya Kalmonovitch’s documentary Tar Sands Songbook.
Watch the full event at the YouTube link below!
“We came up with this concept of grub parties… where we would make [food] communally and connect around the table. … That’s when I developed this philosophy of starting with the visceral to ignite the cerebral and ending at the political.”
“Finding our ancestral foods and eating them, I think that’s more than a spiritual reconnection… it’s also a very pragmatic thing because my DNA is adapted to a very particular place. … We have an endangered sheep that’s four-horned sheep; it’s sacred, we’ve been living with it for tens of thousands of years. And this sheep, their breath stimulates a microbiome in us in a way that European sheep cannot.”