Futuristic Vinaigrette

TTLT Njuthi

Ingredients

4 leaves dried holy basil,

2 cracked pieces of 1 star of anise

pinch of caraway seeds

5 peppercorn

Pinch of salt

Juice from 1 lemon

1 tsp chopped fresh parsley

5 leaves fresh oregano

1 tbsp tamarind paste

1 tsp olive oil

1medium clove of garlic

pinch of grated nutmeg

touch of maple syrup

Process:

Pound all the dry ingredients together

Add the Lemon,oil and Tamarind paste And mix throughly

Grate some Nutmeg as last step.

Serve with salad, boiled beans or radish salad.

Decolonized Salad OutfiT

This might be my last recipe I will be creating for the year. It was inspired by my first student who paid for my class in cryptocurrency back in  February 2021. That essentially made her the first entrant and practitioner of my thesis of Just Food 

As an Antidote to Death Worship. That is a story of another day. Since then, a handful of other practitioners have followed suit. I have learned just as much as I have shared. 

My approach towards foods may sound highly exaggerated and so I wonder why they should pay for something that is so basic that anyone can figure out almost intuitively. That is not a problem that is unique in my experience but the experience of most new concepts. Knowing that has kept me focused on what my passion and interest is regardless of whether anyone ever pay for it. It was a great breakthrough to gain traction outside of academia and other institutions. Lindsey Thomas started a new phase in my work. 

Now that the consequences of food injustices are becoming more obvious as poor diet causes havoc in the health of more and more people across the globe, my ideas seem to gain acceptance more and more. The biggest news in Kenya about a renowned preacher who spent KSH.460 million shillings on cancer treatment in the U.S over one year must have turned the most heads. My thesis is that humans have been set up by having their food culture colonized in front of their eyes. That colonization has taken the form of food illiteracy that has literally erased the advanced food culture over our evolutionary history that is itself the foundation of our advancement as a species. But for the sake of profits a few powerful idiots are on the verge of destroying all the advances of the man species. Extinction of many species has been the cost we have had to pay, but now humans are facing the same extinction as a reality. 

You do math and tell me how sustainable it is for anyone to spend KSH 460 million shillings for medical treatment. While it is true that some of the illnesses might be related to other things, the truth of the matter is that we know all too well what the side effects of the chemicals we use in our food are. 

So I shared here my best vinaigrette I made for the year. Since I am focused on decolonizing our food, I am closing the year with the decolonization of the word vinaigrette. A French word for a salad dressing, typically made with vinegar, oil and spice. In line with my futuristic thinking of ever pushing the boundaries, I decided to formulate a name that would be most appropriate for salad dressing in my language. I arrived at the name Njuthi. I borrowed the word for sauce, mùchuthi and the first letters from the word, njuthí, meaning raw. Since a salad is a form of raw dish, the word for something that makes the salad much more attractive would be our equivalent to vinaigrette.  Funny enough it is just one letter off from my name. 

Ironically, the first Njuthi was named after my first student who paid for a class using cryptocurrency. She was also the first person to pay for a couple. Though the couple did not finish the class as agreed, they opened the door for the next couple of Kenyans living in Australia. TTLT is her mission name and she is still in the class with great plans. 

That she used cryptocurrency to pay for the class is very symbolic as the whole idea behind cryptocurrency is to offer an alternative to fiat currency which robs the currency holder through inflation. That kind of robbery through inflation is exactly the kind of robbery I have observed in food by pushing food that leaves us poorer, much poorer, over time as the case of KSH. 460 million shillings above demonstrates. It is kind of neat to have the first couple paying for the class in a currency that is designed for the same mission that my food is designed for.  Talking about design, the recipe in focus is the first one since the publication of a book on food design by Franseca Zampollo in Italy that was published this week. Contributed an essay and was profiled in the book. It was great to see a picture of the traditional kitchen in my village home in a big book. 

I therefore named my finest Njuthi in honor of the work she has done over the last two years. 

Please visit my website for the recipe that she had paid for to make it available to all. It is our gift and celebration for all the good things that each and everyone out there did to push life worship. 

Eat well and worship life. 

The Herb of the Cross

It was a bit of a surprise to learn that a flower known as Brazilian Verbena that has been growing in our place is an herb with deep roots that extend to various cultures which include ancient Egypt, India and the West.  It’s coolest connection is with Brazil, barely a week after the visit of Professor Paulino from the Amazonia region in Brazil. 

The herb has numerous uses including the calming of nerves and activation of the lactation glands. It is known as the herb of the cross for religious reasons that I seriously doubt ever happened. But that is in the past. Our interest in the plant has to do with its signaling to connections of the future across cultures, and more specifically to the indigenous & Kilombo communities in Brazil. We are delighted to have a herb of the Cross that will hopefully calm and activate the lactation glands of our various cultures in a bid to calm our nerves from centuries of abuse. Incidentally, we have another Brazilian plant which symbolizes the persistent oppression that seems to always reinvent itself. The most vicious form of that oppression is food. The shrub of Brazilian Black pepper is a beautiful shrub but it is also invasive. It has been relatively contained and I am wondering if the app identified the shrub correctly. I didn’t plant the shrub and my parents must have planted it many years ago. How they acquired it and why they planted it will remain a mystery.

What is not a mystery is the world in which we live today is governed by a global system that is invasive and parasitic towards the human rights of the masses. Fewer things symbolize that unjust system than our food and our relationships. That is primarily the cause of sickness and wars. I am of the view that our stomachs are the dumpsite for all of our folly. Plants and animals absorb all the negative energies we emit through industrial processes and chemical farming. We then ingest the same and reflect health effects that mirror our environment. Primitive accumulation of wealth, more mining of natural resources like oil, not even the invention of faster gadgets can turn this futile tide. We have to cross over to a more sustainable and human existence.

Being Black and educated is a tough affair. I almost wish to be blind to keep me from seeing certain things. One of those things are the illusive justice that Africans continue to experience in the most subtle way that allows them to celebrate the shadow of other people’s justice as though it is their own. The problem of justice is complex and it takes more than racial and cultural tones. It comes layered and sexed. Women and men don’t experience injustice. Yet some think that the problem is the other sex, all the while the puppeteer is busy robbing them all. The divisions of color are equally the same. Blacks dream of living the same life as Whites only to realize that the goal post has long been moved by the time they get there. How else do you explain an increasing gap between races even as the economy grows. It doesn’t seem to occur for a minute that the whole system is gamed. The power gap between the races get wider even as more Blacks gain entry into hitherto White fields. Those in power use the power to increase the gap between them and the rest. Those who are behind look at each other and blame each other for their situation. 

The situation is not too bad as long as you go along with it and act like you don’t see. Being a coward pays well in that kind of system. To be African and to wish for change is a complex affair. I often think of the God of the Christians who kills his own son so that man can be saved. In fact, one of the tests of faith in the most important religious guide is willingness to die not for man but for God. A martyr dies for God but God does not die for man.  Man is dying in droves. I have often felt like Black martyrs who like Jesus say crucify me that this suffering may come to an end, but I am rebuffed by many who seem to believe that their salvation can not come from anyone else other than a White person. It matters not how those who come in the name of the various prophets rob and mislead the masses. The way of the book is the one and only way. Nothing else can suffice. 

The quest for justice seems like the story of the overcoat in the story by Nikolai Gogol. In the story Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin is a low level clerk working for the government. He was in dire need of an overcoat to shield him from the bitter cold. Since he earned very little money working for the government, it took him years to save enough money to buy an overcoat. He was so proud of himself that he couldn’t wait to wear it out to a party for his coworkers. On his way from the party that night, his coat was stolen and he ended up dying from cold. Such is the nature of those who yearn for justice in a world that they complain of but one that still gives them so  much meaning and pleasure. Thinking about the complex web of subterfuge is looked at as boring. Like Bashmachkin, the most likely outcome is much of the same. I therefore stand to the side and watch even as I whisper to keep from annoying the oppressed too much that they might slain me. Maybe the only hope is that the masses will suffer enough to realize that the pain is too dense to be wished away or tolerated. How does one trust a government that comes up with endless amounts of money for wars but is hard pressed to keep its books balanced. The government borrows for the sake of a few but the masses are stuck with the debt.

I have therefore settled to farm and create a space of salvation of our stomachs. Maybe, just maybe, just food might do the magic and remove the vail. Anyone who can convince a person who is eating toxic food and claiming to be living life to stop eating against their best health and wealth can do anything, including taking them to heaven.

Our heaven is the farm. There are few places left where one can be a steward of the earth, a healthy stomach and healthy emotions. I am reminded of the best name of any character in Russian literature. That name is of a character in a short story by Leo Tolstoy entitled Where Love is, God Is. The main character is a shoe repairer working in a room in a city. The room is a basement with a window that allows one inside to see the feet of those walking by the street. The shoe cobbler had been repairing shows for so long that he could identify the people walking across the window by their shoes. He could tell a foreigner by simply looking at his shoes. The character was named Martin Avdeitch. I love the character because like him, I can identify aliens by the way they eat the same way Martin could identify members of his community from their shoes. The good bit is that the story is not about shoes or food.  The story is about poverty and loss of family. Martin had lost his wife and son, making him an angry man. When Martin was later introduced to the Bible, he read it with the hope that God would help him. Martin later realized that by loving his fellow man, he could find the peace he was seeking. 

The only small problem is that they poverty and death that was bothering Martin in early Russia taken taken the form of food and the poverty of food have extended to become the poverty of reason and logic. In that confusion, just food has become alien and old fashion. That means what is love has been turned into hate. The end result is a fiat world where most of the relationships and food is fake. I have now become an alien and many look at me in an odd way when I act with love for self and others in the manner I consume and serve food. But in other more mundane matters, much care and love is expressed that would make those in love with humanity, and just food jealous. I mean, how does someone take a birth twice and change his clothes twice but eat food that makes his stomach so dirty three times a day? Very clean on the outside with expensive makeup, apply foundation so that the makeup can stay on and then spray their arm pits so that they can smell like love and justice to their fellow man. In that kind of world, I am an alien. In fact, I am like a the lady  character that Martin interacted with in the story, that character was an old woman who hawked apples around town. Martin called him Babushka. I am not sure if the Russian use that word out of respect or in a dilatory way, but in the West, calling some like me an old woman or anybody for that matter is not considered a compliment. In our culture, you don’t get old as you age, you don’t get older every successive birthday, only an alien can think so. Whether I am considered an alien or even a Babushka, I will love and grow just food. Anything else is Russian roulette.

In the meantime the bees are having a ball falling in love with Spice of the Cross and this is something worth celebrating. Whether those that have turned their stomachs into alien spaces will cross to the side of justice or I will die waiting, I am at peace.

Kilombo & The Great African Catastrophe

The sun delayed setting today in our village in honor of a most humbling connection. Professor Paulino Itamar was our guest. He is a professor at Federal University of Western Pará but also works closely with 9 Kilombo communities inside the Amazon Forest. These communities of Afro Brazilians, also known as maroons, are populated by Africans who escaped slavery during the painful period of African Catastrophe. Many of these communities were able to resist every effort by the Portuguese to this day.

Professor Paulino has officially invited me to Brazil to give a symposium at his university and also do an event with the Kilombo communities. I understand that these communities are eager to connect with other Africans, something they haven’t done for over 250 years. The communities are in the very interior of the forest and have only been recognized by the government not too long ago. I have spoken to one of professor Paulino’s masters class along with the late environmentalists Wanjiku Mwangi, Professor Sally Nyambura and Thiong’o wa Gachie.

The students shared some of their favorite recipes at the end of our presentation. Some of the students are eager to visit Kenya and also spend a little at our farm and we can reciprocate by sharing some of our recipes made with food that is as close as possible to the food that the first ancestors of the Africans the diaspora ate before they were caught up in the African Catastrophe.

On his part, professor Paulino shared a great story of a Black masquerade character known as FOBO. FOBOR appears at a festival parade and punishes powerful individuals who misuse their powerful positions or resources to oppress others. I was very interested in the story and even wrote a short essay about it. I hope to one day see the masquerade of Fobòr in person. How cool would it be to have FOBOR at my dinner.

In any case we are glad for opportunity at hand. I am focused at the series of dinners on our farm with the community and the African Diaspora.Those first dinners is what I call the Dinner of Return. It’s the closest concept I know to spirituality. By preparing the farm to grow such important food, we are acknowledging the Great Catastrophe in all Africans and all those who perpetrated it and continue to both benefit from it as well as keep it alive, albeit in different form. We then follow that recognition with action and gratitude.

Kilombos is our spirit of resilience and resistance. Just food is the fuel that drives that resistance. It is a common thread amongst all those who were against the Great African Catastrophe. We shall overcome. Today we overcame the divide across language, color and culture. In other words we ate as one and we ate Just Food. It’s the least we can do to uphold our humanity in a time of intense darkness. When I make it Brazil, I will light another star in our constellation of Beautiful Blackness that shine. My parents would be most proud of their work to hear that their dreams of freedom, justice and love is being felt as far as the Amazon. Mau Mau meets Kilombo again over the Dinner of Return. In honor of those who have fought so hard using their own marshal arts like capoeira and indigenous spiritual system like voodoo and Santeria, we killed a cock and uttered the peace refrain Thayù Thayú. One Thayü for the Professor and one for the Kilombo communities that have invited me to their community. When I make to Brazil, I will start the same way we ended and the Kilombo will close the best way we know how. The spirit of Kilombo is the spirit of food justice, an integral part of overcoming the Great African Catastrophe. A deep debt of gratitude to all the stewards who have been working on that for all the generations past and those yet to come and those support this vision from a far even though they might never eat a morsel of grain from these farms. To those generous souls, may the FOBO 0f the carnival called life smile on you.

The Chestnut Allegory

By Chef Kabui

Cape Chestnut is one eatery in Nanyuki that sets itself apart from other food joints that I have visited. When I say it is a different space, I mean it in every sense. Let me start by warning anyone with a closed mind and a faint wit that this restaurant is not for them. It is not all in vain for that person(s), for at the very least, they know not to waste their energy going there. However, they surely will miss the palpable love and warmth of the space.

The restaurant is owned and operated by two women, who are also partners. One is an American trained chef and the other is an Indian self-made chef. The eclectic combination of the two cultures, training and passion makes for a perfect recipe of food that adds value to an African culinary tour. I typically would not eat American or Indian food during my tours in Kenya, but this is one experience I truly appreciated. My hesitation to eat these foods are largely emotional as well as political. I grew up with Indian friends and later moved to America where I have been living amongst some solid American friends. In both of these instances, I have matured enough to separate individuals from their dominant culture. I am able to live and thrive in that duality of a White oppressive power and to have some honest friends who happen to be white. A similar binary holds in my dealing with Africans. I now understand, regrettably, that not all Africans desire freedom or are willing to pay the price for it. That ultimately leaves me is a point of discrimination. Yes, you read that right. 

“Discrimination” started as a positive word until it was politicized by the oppressors. These oppressors practiced an illegitimate form  of discrimination to deny other's their rights to their culture, wealth, labor, markets, education and health. Yet, the etymology of the word has nothing to do with injustices, but rather discernment.  In other words, discrimination is the ability to tell differences for the sake of making the correct decision or choice. 

I, therefore, appreciated the restaurant because it represented my food story outside the African experience. The first foreign food that I ate was Indian. The latest influence on my food thinking is American. I call these influences the stem. The root is African, and they all bear fruit that is a synthesis of African, Indian and American, which I call Afro Futuristic Conscious Cuisine. 

I have to confess that the above description is overly simplistic and only useful in my narration of this specific story. Had I enough time and space and patience on your part, I would indulge in an equally interesting exegesis about how each of the three cultural cuisines are equally interconnected at their root. African food is deeply influenced by Indians who came to Kenya to build railways in the late 1800s. America was founded as a result of Europeans desire for Indian spices. Africans had been trading with Asia long before the coming of Arabs and Europeans. 

The connections do not end with the cultural and professional ties of the owners of Chestnut, but also with the word “chestnut”. Chestnuts also have an interesting story for Indigenous Africans, Asians, Americans and even Europeans. The tree contributed greatly to the building of wealth in modern day America. Enslaved Africans were central in the gathering of the nuts for food from the tree, which was sometimes referred to as the “bread tree". Its valuable wood is rot-resistant (though that did not make it immune to an Asian fungus that attacked the American Chestnut tree species that numbered in the billions).  As a tree that starts to produce nuts at 40 years and can live to be 1000 years, it is a symbol of both food security and vulnerability. In America, Indigenous people knew how to make both milk and flour for communities that provided a major source of the starch. Now, science has proven that chestnuts are a superior source of starch and contain other minerals such as selenium. The name, therefore, has an equally complex history that spans a wide period and across cultures. 

The Chestnut Restaurant represents the positive aspects of this long history, that is, the resilience, the nurturing aspects and a healthy dose of uniqueness. The two owners took time to welcome me and share their vision and philosophy. They have a farm in Mauu that provides them with a bulk of their food. That means that they do not have a standard menu. Their kitchen runs around the season. 

One thing that you will not find there is anything plastic. I need not do anything except give a big salute. The restaurant earned a place in my crass heart. That is one team that I would love to collaborate with for a fine dinner because our history, philosophy and destiny are aligned.

I could not hide my excitement about what I was hearing about the restaurant. My sister Wanjiku from Porini had to be a genius to select this as one of the places in Nanyuki to visit. Thinking about the chestnut can create a cultural and historical thesis about food of the triple heritage of the cultures aforementioned. It has not always been fancy but we have enough good to build a culture that is as valuable, transcendent and futuristic as a chestnut.

Batian & Food Heroism

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.

Campaign For Organic Shit

While appearing on Inooro FM, a Kenyan radio station where I am a regular contributor, Nderitu Waihura, the host closed the interview with a comment about the latest celebrity in my village. The new celebrity is breaking all kinds of records and neither of those records are in the marathon or any equivalent races. In fact the celebrity is not human. The interesting bit is that the big news is less of what it has done but everything about what it has not done. That sounds a bit odd, I know that. So it warrants a bit of explaining. About three years ago, we embarked on creating the best soil to grow our food for a learning farm and a food literacy center in Naivasha, Kenya. In designing the project, it occurred to me that I had to secure an organic source of manure if I hoped to succeed in my efforts. That came after some anthropological research on the ground about the level of literacy about the dangers and benefits of shit. Many of the farmers I talked to did not seem to make the connection between what they feed their animals and the quality of manure they would get. Many seemed to think that their manure was organic even though they were feeding their animals commercial feed which had been grown using toxic chemicals like Roundup. We went to great lengths to grow our own fodder and then acquired three cows and 9 goats for the purpose of securing organic manure. We raised the first batch of cows with organic food and until they gave birth to the first set of calves. The first calf was pure brown without any blemish. I named the calf MW or Mississippi Warren from my African American grandmother. Then drought and lie set in and we had to curl our herd to only one calf. That calf tested our limits, we spent over six times its value in securing organic feed. In the end, we succeeded in breeding it and in the end got a beautiful calf that exceeded all the labor we had put in.

I received the news about the birth of our calf while on the campus of UNC Greensboro where I was doing a residency for a couple of days. Both Profs. Meredith and Plaxedes had worked so hard to make the residency possible but also to make it very convenient on my part. When I first looked at the picture of the calf, it was black and white and had a heart on its forehead. The first thing that came to mind was the kin relationship that Meredith and I shared. She had introduced me to a lot of people, including Professor Plaxedes, who is from Zimbabwe. I did not even think twice about the name for our third generation organic calf, I named the calf MP, from Meredith Powers.

The fourth generation calf will be PC for Professor Chitiyo. It quickly occurred to me that the acronym in Kenya stands for Member of Parliament, the equivalent of a state representative in the U.S. It was a bit ironic because many know that I am a student of political science and that my political views are not conventional. In fact we had a very intense political discussion during the same radio interview. I am however glad that our cows are getting radical love and attention. I especially love their names which extend from Mississippi to Zimbabwe and from White to Black. Yet what turns many people’s heads is the price of this cow with the name of a Mississippi queen who once worked as a sharecropper and had little education, yet has a black and white calf named after a one Black and one White professor.

Njenga is another great friend I met through my appearances on Inooro radio. He later took my class with his wife about 9 months ago and it has transformed their health. They followed the class to the T even though it was quite pricey. They had to get rid of a lot of things in their kitchen, pantry and even the bar, but they are much happier now and I haven’t heard any regrets. They also don’t eat anywhere else except at their home. The two could as well be professors of food discipline. In fact, I have invited them once to share their experience with others, hoping that their discipline could rub on others. I wasn’t too lucky that time but I am still in the race. knows the Njenga has been following Afro Futuristic food regiment with great results. He therefore knows the value of milk. He lives in Australia but will be in Kenya for the holidays. The Njenga family has offered to buy all the milk available for the same price he pays for his milk in Australia. That comes to about $8.00 dollars or KSH.1200. That is a whopping 24 times the regular price of milk in the village. The Kefir made from our goat milk will fetch about $10.00 or about KSH 1500. That instantly made both Mississippi Warren famous. No other cow in my village or in the country has produced milk which commanded a higher price as far as we can tell. Njenga will be in town for a whole month and will most likely consume enough milk to buy another heifer. He has been a great support of the project but he is acting out of conviction. He is not trying to raise the price of milk by 2400 percent but making a statement that health comes at a cost.

The radio host was surprised by the act and it got him and the listeners thinking. Njenga’s goal was achieved. He knows that we don’t sell the milk as it is used up by our student workers and our friends who have been supporting us during the incubation period. We have already had one workshop for composting and we have organic seeds available to the community.

However nobody felt more special than those who work on the farm. They had no idea how expensive the milk they consumed was. When they did the math, organic food made sense. They get 8 liters of milk a day, at a price of KSH 1200, Njenga would pay them KSH 9.600. It would take 192 liters of chemical milk or what I call fiat milk to gross the same amount of money as the 8 liters of clean Just Milk. That is very close to the first milk I drank as a child in my village. Yet today, it is practically impossible for me to find it.

My friend Meredith had other Just ideas. She had been touched by the calf with a love symbol on her head. She has decided to spearhead a campaign in the name of MP and to raise almost $33,000 to support the second phase of the project.

We are building a local seed bank, living quarters for staff and completing our only house.

Just like Njenga and a number of other regular supporters, Meredith has been following our journey from up close. I am delighted that our desire to grow food with clean shit is disrupting a lot of the bullshit in food. The discussion on radio was therefore based on the simple fact the milk and fodder for the queen of love and the queen of Mississippi have been raised without bovine version of Junk foods on one hand and the fact that Njenga, the king of discipline, believes enough about food justice that he is willing to pay a Just price for Just Food.

As my friend and colleague Don Thornton frie once said, you can’t eat without shit. In other words, we have to have manure if we expect to eat long term. Just like good government that we campaign to have, we have to campaign for Just shit. Our desire to spread love without the toxic byproducts in food is causing wonderful things to happen beyond our imagination. The next time you hear someone saying that they don’t want shit, ask them to try the organic version, it might be worth more than they think.

Please consider supporting this initiative with love. I don’t want to hear any excuses, unless you think that you can have Just food without organic research. Reach out if you feel moved to act.

No Suit Recipe

I had an interesting conversation this evening with a gentleman I was connected with by a dear friend. The discussion was about sizable speaking gigs. The conversation was a form of interview but quite cordial and relaxed. Towards the end of the conversation, the gentleman asked me how I dress. I calmly answered that I typically wear African shirts or a whole African attire. The next question was whether I own a suit. Being blatantly honest, I replied that I gave all my suits away years back and I got out of the suit and tie business from that point to today. My contact asked me if I would wear a suit if he would buy me one. My answer was in the affirmative but with a slight caveat. I didn’t mind wearing a suit if any superior logic could convince me that my logic to give away my suits was faulty. I then clarified that it’s not my inability to buy a suit that results in my wearing African clothes. It is out of a conscious, well thought out decision. There was a brief pause. Can I ask you why you decided against wearing a suit?, he asked.

I answered that it was done for two reasons. First reason is out of strategy. I wanted to demonstrate the message of my lectures in my dressing. My cuisine, research and my activism are all based on AfroFuturism. It is also the way I live, as inspired by the best knowledge and practices of my ancestors that had been despised for many years and much of which has already been lost. I then add the numerous other lessons from the global village. For me to wear African clothes is the most sensible act as it compliments my commitment to eat and live internationally. I typically don’t do things just to the sake of acting. I can’t pretend that it is justice to normalize a suit. What extra performance do I gain when I wear a suit? Where is it written in stone that you are only acceptable and worthy of being taken seriously only when I wear a suit. It goes without saying that we perpetuate injustice by the clothes we wear without realizing it. For that reason, I am disrupting that injustice of normalizing the suit while making other attires abnormal. The British in India and Africa were against the locals weaving their own clothes so that they could support the textile industry of the British. The first major industry that propelled the British into an empire was the textile industry. That industry was largely subsidized by cheap cotton grown in the American south by enslaved Africans. I see the same injustice continuing to this day when Africans spend so much money on name brands while the health conditions in this community continue to experience serious health disparities. He who feeds you and clothes you rules you. The majority of the cotton used to make clothes today is done using GMO cotton or cotton grown with the use of toxic chemicals that are harmful to the environment. It is an opaque industry that gives us so much fiat joy.

Secondly, I dress in a way that sends the message of a concept I call “RIOF”, which simply stands for ratio of inside to outside fashion. That is simply comparing how much one puts on themselves as compared to what they put inside themselves. Resources being constant, a negative RIOF means that you are investing more on the outside than on the inside fashion. The goal is to have the highest positive number. It doesn’t mean that we should go naked by any means, but it is a matter worth looking at closely. I understand that this is not obvious to everyone and it does not just occur to me. I arrived at this observation after much study. It occurred to me that many people were so concerned with how they look to others and nowhere nearly as concerned about how they actually feel and look on the inside. That kind of thinking has very detrimental consequences on our health, our culture and our environment.

There are many other reasons but that is for another day. The middle aged White male agreed that he had no superior logic but actually learned something. A deal was reached. Had the job required that I wear the suit just because, I would have politely passed on the job. I cannot normalize oppression. After all, many of the crimes committed today are done on account of orders and laws passed by people wearing suits , titles under their names and mostly religious. Closely behind those with suits are the farmers, soldiers and those in chef coats, they play a major role in the fiat system. The beautiful news is that we are the ones who pay and authorize all the above people as consumers. If we decide not to consume anything they produce with injustice, a true religion would have dawned. One that we all can agree on and benefit from whether we shout about it or not. That is the only religion I aspire to. It’s a religion based on justice for all. That is what I call life worship. Today was not in vain if I managed to get one soul to even consider that religion as a possibility. If he hires me, it will be based on how I have dressed my stomach and my brain. That is major progress for anyone, leave alone an activist Africa like me. My branded cuisine is my fashion for the inside and outside. It is antithetical to the injustice to any toxic fashion, textile, brands and concepts. It is a journey and I am just starting. That pride comes before a fall is a fallacy only fit for theatre. In politics, otherwise known the economy of living, pride is a potent weapon. I adorn mine with regal abandon.