I'm restoring my ancestral food vibe in the space that first nurtured my understanding of what I call "Food Heroism". Food Heroism is a simple concept. It observes the foundational nature of food and of its central role in human evolution and civilization. Those basic lessons have informed my conclusion that of all the battles that have been fought, from the oldest recorded Western war epic of Homer over a woman named Helen, to the modern imperial wars fought over a black liquid known as oil, the most significant battle is one still to be fought. It's the gorrilla war--to recover control of our food.
I know that any battle has to have a historical context. Mine is partly personal, and partly global. Both of those two aspects can be deduced by the types of food that was growing in our farm in my young days. The person I am today, the values I hold dear, and the battles I engage in are deeply influenced by the crops that were grown by my family, and by the way they grew them.
As I am remaking my family farm in a more contemporary Afro Futuristic fashion, I am saving some of the historical food relics of my youth. One such crop that was a key consumer of our time and energy was coffee. I have saved 33 trees from my mother’s original stock, for memory's sake. They are a form of living cenotaph for my mother’s toil on the land. The type of coffee trees I am growing are known as "Batian", a fitting word from old English, meaning to fatten (in a healthy way, in other words, to feed in the purest sense), to make better, or to heal.
That was our holy food trinity of the past, the struggle and code of our ancestors. "Batian", to feed, to improve, and to heal is now the faded godhead I am determined to resore, as articulated in my cuisine by the word "Futurism".
The original coffee trees were all cut down. My 33 relics are all new young shoots from some of those originals. We look forward to having a few lbs of organic coffee for our experimentation. We used to believe that the coffee had to be sprayed with toxic chemicals to survive, yet we haven’t sprayed ours with anything, but we are already harvesting a respectable amount from the young trees. We don’t have to produce any set amount because we don’t owe anyone for chemicals and toxic fertilizers. Some farms near our own were destroyed in the quest for high productivity. Those farms are now death fields or junkies for drugs that killed the fertility of the soil in the first place.
Unfortunately for many, today's dinner plates are a testimonial of having lost the battle of Food Heroism. But as human history has shown even losing significant battles doesn't necessarily mean the war is over. We are working hard to win the war. The name Batian also happens to be the English name of the highest peak on Mt. Kenya, otherwise known as Kírínyaga. The mountain has deep spiritual significance in my culture. My ancestors were fascinated by the white snow on the peak of the mountain. My name Njathi is associated with a few things, among them the highest of the three peaks on Kíng’ang’a. The colonial period introduced the name Batian. The white snow is slowly disappearing due to the changes in weather and degradation of our food and environmental conditions. That disregard of our food has its roots in colonialism. Food Heroism can recenter our community.
With a name like mine, parents like mine, and a history to boot, I couldn’t escape my fate in Food Heroism. We are looking up to our food, from whence our health, our life and heroism comes from.