While flipping through a philosophy book about Martin Luther and the Reformation, I ran into a headline that captured my imagination. The headline of that chapter was the Diet of Worms. Before I could catch my self, I had already allowed my mind to label Martin Luther as a chef and reformer of medieval diet by introducing worms in the decrepit culinary tradition of Europe. I was obviously aware that Europe was at cusp of the most momentous transformation whose effect are with us today. These were some of the most important three or four decades in the history of food and justice.
The Diet of Worms was a gathering of leading clergy in the town or Worms Germany to decide the fate of the Martin Luther following his revolutionary act of writing the now popular 95 thesis that fundamentally changed the power of the Papacy and the Catholic church. This act was probably the most important event in the history of Christianity in the last 500 years. The character of Martin Luther would also inspire the works of an African American thinker and Civil Rights leader by the same name in America.
Columbus had landed in America a mere three decades before the Diet of Worms in 1521. Columbus took many new foods from the Americas back to Europe. Those new foods included corn, pepper, tomatoes, beans, cacao and avocados. While these foods had not exactly become European staples, the reformation and along with it the Diet of Worms was about to play a big role in forever changing the food of Europe and by extension that of Africa.
The story of Diet of Worms is significant to me because the global "Food Reformation " that followed the Protestant Reformation by Martin Luther with his 96 Thesis is literally written in blood.
Columbus acquired the new foods from the Americas at high cost of genocide and Africa received the same food at many times the initial cost in blood and plundered resources. In other words, our food history is marked with a trilogy of bloodletting that makes food justice an integral part of our shared past.
The production of foods continues on this bloodletting path globally.
There is the second part of the heading and one that ignited my interest the most. That part is the one about worms. When I first went on my own cultural voyage from my village in Central region of Kenya and the home of my Gìkùyù ethnic group to the shores of Lake Victoria, I gathered my own worm stories amongst the Luo community. During the onset of rain season, I would accompany my friends as they collected winged termites into bowls amongst a frenzy of crowed yards as each family tried to gather as much manner from the sky as possible. If there ever was a perfect example of diet of worms in my head, then that was it. I once followed my friend Akinyi to her house to see exactly how those flying termites would be turned into a meal. That is a story of another day.
What is interesting is that how such childhood memories of the beautiful Akinyi with her silver earrings and a necklace made of a twisted string attracted me to the heading of the Diet of Worms. I thought that the idea of eating termites was so strange until much later as a graduate student when I learned that my own people ate grasshoppers during the times of famine. In fact, there is a famine that is known as the famine of grasshoppers. Instead of my ancestors writing about it and putting the material in an elite library, they did what most indigenous people would do by adding it into their folklore. They did this by naming an age group after the grasshoppers. Since then, the name Ngigí entered our lexicon of male names.
The idea that Europe was dealing with the consequences of illegitimate religious power and exploitation of the masses, the indigenous community was living in harmony with nature. The ideas that are currently trending about the sustainability of eating insects in not new for many indigenous community. But those touting permaculture and a host of other sustainable ideas, it is important to remember that all those ideas are not new. It is a from of injustice to destroy the food ways of indigenous people and then go back to them later with new terms for the their old ideas sold as new and foreign.
The Diet of Worms was not about Europeans eating sustainably but about the efforts to subvert the much needed Protestant Reformation that broke the stranglehold of the Catholic Church on matters of religion. Five hundred and twenty years later, all of us, regardless of color, ethnicity or religious affiliation are at a crossroads. We are now faced with our own Diet of Worms, the case is not about protestant reformation, but about our food. The eternal damnation of a poor diet is far much more lethal to the environment than the toxicity of religious intolerance of the 16th century. If we do not do the right thing, we will all find ourselves in a hot pot as the the winged termites that Akinyi and I collected in our childhood days.
One of those changes is to eat in the natural cycle of the seasons like Akinyi’s community and practically as the age group of NgigÍ did. Please welcome Akiny and Ngigi as two stories of triump for the indigenous food and justice. When you add the story of the Diet of Worm, a balanced trinity is created that can potentially cleanse our curse from the bloodied history of the spreading of food by colonial and empire-builders. Many Africans and their benefactor are still deeply caught up under the same spell of food injustice driven for the benefit of the powerful and the detriment of the oppressed. Luckily, we all don’t need to eat a diet of worms to bring about change, what we do have to do is acknowledge the wisdom of those who were wise enough to live sustainably and then build on it.
Our diet of worm takes place every time we open our mouths and take a bit. Each and every single bit we take promotes justice or injustice. Now decide which side you are on, but you cannot be neutral. The price of a collection of poor choices is that we will all be a diet for the worms in our graves prematurely. As Billy Holiday reminded us in her song, Strange Fruit , any failure to act in the face of such a global calamity will be strange indeed. It would be strange indeed to have the whole globe wrapped in “Blood in the leaves and blood at the root.” How prophetic Billy?