Here, I begin to recognize food as a lifeline: not only in the literal body-sustaining sense, but as one of the most intimate aspects of community, connection, and healing. When I begin to cook and garden and source produce directly from my home community, the anxiety that held my body taut slips away.

My dad is the first to notice that I start singing in the shower again and remarks that I’ve seemed more like myself than I have in months. When he finally snags a full weekend away from the hospital, he takes me on our favorite hike: a 7-mile loop in the Smokies featuring a centuries-old poplar tree and frequent elk sightings. I start opening up to him again, telling him about how terrified the pandemic has made me, how confused I am about the future, and how my interactions with food are feeling just as restorative as a good therapy session. Our hike is cut short by a sudden summer thunderstorm, and we race along the flooding trail, our footsteps keeping time with the rhythm of the creek rushing alongside us.

When we finally emerge into the clearing near the parking lot, the elk herd is there to greet us. An old sow, slightly separated from the herd grazing in the misty field, crosses the gravel path some feet in front of us. For a second, we all freeze, and the forest around us seems to hold its breath. As quickly as the moment came upon us, it ends with a subtle nod from her before she turns away and continues on her path to rejoin the herd. My dad and I spend the whole ride home in near-complete silence, still in awe of her beauty and grateful that the Eastern elk herds haven’t been completely wiped out. Even though my parents are both devout Catholics—I was too, until I began to question the punitive teachings and violent actions of the Church—I have never seen my dad so reverent. In the weeks that follow, I think about how he’s spent so much of my adolescence trying to teach my brother and me about how sacred the land is. I’m reminded of the shirts in local outdoor stores that display the John Muir quote “I’d rather be in the mountains thinking of God, than in church thinking about the mountains,” and wonder how my constantly-nurtured love for the lands I’ve called home would’ve been suppressed had I grown up elsewhere, or raised by different people.

The curiosity and love I hold for the ecosystems around me has been important to me from a young age, and my parents did whatever they could to help nurture and sustain that passion. While my other pre-school friends were interested in princesses and pink, I wanted to spend my days searching our backyard for interesting insects, climbing the sugar maple in our yard, wandering Lake Hickory’s shore on hunts for water snakes, creating “potions” from the flowers and herbs my mom had carefully planted, and traipsing through the woods to pick wild blackberries. I could not understand why so many people found the creatures that I saw as complex, beautiful beings as gross and undesirable, and nothing brought on anger in my child self more than witnessing young boys dismember live beetles or driving by roadkill. When I went outside, I was filled with the desire to learn everything I could about the ecosystems around me, not to dominate the landscape but to know how to best respect it. For my sixth birthday, instead of Barbies, princess gowns, American Girl Dolls, or other plasticy toys, my parents gifted me with giant books on reptiles and an “Animal Encyclopedia.” Even though I couldn’t understand most of the text in these books, I’d spend rainy days and chilly evenings flipping through the pages and picking out my favorite species. I memorized hundreds of facts about exotic species I’ll likely never see in real life, and my parents only ever encouraged me when I’d regurgitate them at the dinner table. When I entered puberty and began to first show symptoms of Major Depressive Disorder, the most troubling sign for my parents was my lack of desire to spend time outside.

As updates on the upcoming fall semester trickle in, I make the decision to take time off. There are many things food can do, but solving undiagnosed mental illnesses is not usually one of them, and the thought of heading back to a campus where I wouldn’t be able to hug my closest friends sounded like a one-way ticket back to my mental state in early spring. My parents ask me what I plan to do instead, and I tell them I’d like to farm. The concern in my dad’s eyes dissolves into excitement, and he tells me that he’s always thought I would end up with a herd of goats someday. 

We purchase a WWOOFusa membership on my birthday, $40 for a year’s access to the network of thousands of farmers and farms nationwide. Once the fee was paid, I spend days sifting through the site’s various filters and reading farmstay descriptions. I encounter everything from urban community gardens to single-family homesteads to bison ranches to hemp growers. Finally, I settle on spending my first month at a homestead only a few hours away from home, in case everything I’ve learned about myself over the past few months is a lie. 

I arrive at Spinning Plates farm in mid-August, just in time for the summer heat to fade from unbearable to sweltering. The farm is run by a middle-aged couple, Lish and Wayne, and is “managed” (read: destroyed) by their hellion children. When I arrive, the first thing I see is a looming white farmhouse surrounded by old junk cars—I later learn these are scrap supplies for a pet project of Wayne’s, who, before the pandemic worked as a rigger, using his mechanical knowledge to construct and repair nearly everything on the farm—and the kids’ toys. An old hound greets me at my car door when I park, while their new puppy and two orange barn cats watch me from a distance. I am introduced to the whole family in a whirlwind before being shown my room in the “tin can,” a scrapped trailer that has four walls and a leaky ceiling but offers far better shelter than a tent. I sleep on a cot in the end room for the next month and fall asleep to the humming of crickets and clucking of the nearby chicken coop. The other WWOOFers there, Phil and Mara, are a young couple who have spent the past few years working seasonally and farming in the off-time. They live together in a 16 ft “tiny house” that they built themselves from a blue trailer shell, and we eat breakfast on their “porch” (read: the back door, which swings down to create a cinderblock-supported patio) every morning after our chores. 

After lunch, I’m taken on a tour of the 40 acres that make up the farm. We begin with the goats, a small herd that supplies milk, meat, and shrub clearing for the family, and I fall in love with them instantly. I spend each morning meditating on the picnic bench next to their pasture before hand milking Lily, a brown alpine who loves nose scratches. In the sunny afternoons, when it’s too hot to do anything else, we take the herd to the back pasture and let them graze on 2ft tall grasses and brambles. I’m introduced to the twelve nameless laying hens and rooster, the four pigs, the half-dozen rabbits that the kids have named despite Lish’s protests, and a lush, overgrown vegetable garden. As we walk through the pastures and explore the various sheds on the property, Lish gives us a haphazard list of tasks to complete in the next few days, and I find that I’m not struggling to retain information for the first time in months. We spend the rest of the afternoon weeding in the garden and stealing bite-sized orange tomatoes from the vine, and I have one of the most delicious meals of my life that night.

Over the next month, I repair a chicken coop roof; help butcher a goat and provide an anatomy lesson to the kids; plan, plant, and tend to the beginnings of a fall garden; milk goats every day; visit an off-grid duck homestead down the road; get paid to process chickens at a farm down the road; and cook almost every day. I begin to read for pleasure again and spend my free time trying to identify trees in the wooded back area of the property with the help of a borrowed field guide. Lish and I have conversations for days in the kitchen about farming and food and queerness and motherhood. I spend hours listening to her friend Dara talk about her urban backyard quail setup while we can tomatoes and make pounds of homemade butter. Phil lends me some books on starting a farm and I am first introduced to the word “permaculture”. Our next door neighbor Leslie dumpster dives at the nearest Walmart and makes smoothies from the dozens of cartons of wasted berries—this quickly becomes one ofmy favorite breakfasts, second only to the burritos filled with fresh eggs, rabbit sausage, and homemade tomatillo salsa. Mara teaches me her family’s focaccia recipe and we pick fresh rosemary from the garden to decorate the top. Our off-grid neighbor Anthony brings us bottles of homemade spiked kombucha and tells us the recipe, though I forget it immediately. I learn from Ben, the chicken farm owner, that chicken poop is incredibly high in nitrogen and takes forever to compost. He gives us the chicken feet, gizzards, and livers that would’ve gone to compost one processing day, and Lish spends the following day making gallons of stock and gizzard adobo.

The person who left Spinning Plates in late September is unrecognizable compared to the person who arrived in North Carolina in March.  There are plenty of young college students whose lives are changed entirely by the WWOOFing experience; connecting to the land through food cultivation is life-changing in itself. The work I embark on is not intended to be read as a negation of the benefits of WWOOFing, but rather as an interrogation of the healing work that food and food-based communities are doing that exists outside of WWOOFing. I was able to gain so much from my farmstay experience, but how much of what I learned to value can be traced to the experience itself, and how much of it was beneficial for me because of the ways my personal interests, family teachers, and nurtured interests in food, land, and community have influenced the way I approached my time on the farm? How does our personal and community introduction to food determine how we understand the possibilities of food-based futures? 

While I was never in exclusively white spaces while WWOOFing, all of the places I worked and learned had majority working-class white populations. Every farm I worked at was owned and operated by a white person. This was a trend I had noticed while beginning my search for locations: on the WWOOFing website, they offer a filter that highlights “BIPOC-operated” farmstays, but only a few dozen of the nearly two thousand farms listed meet this metric. The long violent histories of forced migration and displacement of Black and Indigenous farmers and the lack of material support for farmers of color (often seen in the present through higher rates of loan denial) can attribute to some of this disparity, but do not account for the numerous Black-and-Indigenous-operated farms, community gardens, homestays, and other sites of food learning, justice, and sovereignty that maintain and grow outside of the world of WWOOFing. Black farmers not only participated in American agriculture for centuries as slaves, sharecroppers, and free citizens, but also created and adapted many of the most important agricultural techniques that are popularly used today, bringing and maintaining agrarian traditions with them as they were forcibly transported across the Middle Passage (1). The American economy was borne on the backs of Black and Indigenous agrarian knowledge and labor. Indigenous farmers have cultivated this land since time immemorial, have cultivated and maintained thousands of varieties of seeds, and have employed sustainable harvesting practices pre- and despite colonization, passing on crucial food-based knowledges even in the face of genocide (2). With these disparities in mind, I began to ask: if not through WWOOFing, where and how are Black and Indigenous food-workers maintaining and continuing agrarian knowledge-sharing and food-based teaching? 

Part of this answer lies in the “why” Black and Indigenous farmers might not use the WWOOF network to bring people into their work. WWOOFing is not affordable or feasible for anyone who’s living paycheck to paycheck, as none of the farmstays are officially paid gigs. Instead, work is exchanged for food, lodging, and education. It’s possible to work odd jobs on the side at some locations, but this is determined by the accessibility of the farm, the amount of hours worked, what kind of labor you’re doing, and the ability to leave the farm. For college students and young white people who have time and money to spare as they navigate the world, WWOOFing is a great way to temporarily escape the corporate rat-race and job-finding that looms overhead, but for most other folks, it’s an inaccessible fantasy (3). This materially extractive aspect of the WWOOFing experience can resurface intergenerational trauma in ways that prohibit food-based healing. 

Further, because of the whiteness of WWOOFing spaces, the knowledges being produced are transmitted by white people for white people, wherein farmstay hosts lean heavily on the tenets of white-led sustainability, agriculture, and permaculture, rather than consulting and uplifting Black and Indigenous agrarian traditions and the emerging knowledges that have influenced these white-led movements. Instead, as young white farmers learn about sustainability, agriculture, and permaculture during their farmstays, they begin to form a new generation of white farmers who, either unconsciously or deliberately, uphold white supremacist ideologies of domination and contribute to settler moves of innocence through benevolence. Because the work they’re doing on these farms does benefit the land and subverts the dangerously extractive nature of big-agriculture industry, they are enabled to understand white-led sustainability and permaculture as an uncriticizable good. Rather than examining the continued cultural harm of the occlusion of Black and Indigenous sustainable gathering, gardening, and farming knowledges through Western scientific domination, the work of white-led sustainability, agriculture, and permaculture focuses almost solely on the environmental and lacks the community consciousness and intergenerational inter-dependence that is crucial to Black and Indigenous understandings of food and land sovereignty. How does this sole focus on the environmental benefits in white-operated sustainable farming in fact operate in ways that actually encourage settler occupation of Native land and the marginalization of Black relationships to land?

On their website, WWOOFers are able to choose several reasons for their interest in WWOOFing from a list, as well as write a quick biography describing their personal ties to the work they’re hoping to do. One of the more commonly chosen reasons is an interest in travel and seeing locations they wouldn’t otherwise be able to visit. This kind of listing incentivizes farmstays in more exotified, distant locations, creating an ecotourism-style environment on more sought-after farmstays. When not working, these WWOOFers often engage in popular tourist activities rather than getting to know the local communities they’re inhabiting. Once their farmstay has ended, they then head home or to another WWOOFing site, often never to return. Depending on where they’re working, the knowledge they gain from their hands-on education isn’t readily applicable to the environments of the locations they call home. In this kind of scenario, rather than a work-trade educational program, WWOOFing functions as an extended escapist vacation that hinders inter-community relationships. 

WWOOF farmstays in less desirable locations are often underbooked in comparison to these higher-priority tourist destinations. These tourist destinations exist on stolen, exploited land, particularly land whose prices have been inflated to the point that Black and Indigenous farmers often cannot afford to return to live and grow on these homelands. And for Black and Indigenous farmers who have retained or returned to land, inviting young white ecotourists who’ll disappear from their communities as soon as their farmstay program has ended is generally antithetical to their farms’ missions. Inviting WWOOFers to their farms for free labor reduces these farms’ ability to provide sustainable jobs for members of their communities, and would require the farms to rely on external, unpredictable help from outsiders who are not necessarily in the work for reasons that can coexist with a holistic community-based food mission. 

The work of food sovereignty for Black and Indigenous communities must then exist, at least in part, counter to the WWOOFing network. It cannot only subvert and/or deliberately challenge white domination of agricultural knowledge and culturally extractive practices of WWOOFing farmstays, it also entails constructing alternative imaginings of collective farm-based futures. Though not all food and land sovereignty movements led by Black and/or Indigenous communities have an obligation to include or invite white people interested in the work into their fold, there is an underlying question of how to change the cultural consciousness of white-led sustainability work to inhibit settler moves to innocence through benevolence and the moralistic superiority rooted in Western scientific dominion over what’s considered valid or truthful knowledge. Though the problem of returning stolen land to Native nations and de-marginalizing Black people’s relationships to land will at some point require a shift in the consciousness of white Americans, even as Black and Indigenous food and land sovereignty movements are constantly considering the future survival of their communities much of the present focus is geared towards re-imagining the lands that Black and Indigenous communities live on as sites of potential abundance. At this point in time, the work must center intra-community reconnection to the land, food-based traditions, and undoing the white supremacist violence of forced governmental dependence by creating ecologies of communal self-reliance.

While the visible scarcity illustrated by the “BIPOC-operated” filter on the host search displays a narrative lack, this story of nothingness is a false one. It’s reified by terms like “food desert,” which not only puts the “focus on what is missing in a neighborhood,” but naturalizes the deliberate work of white supremacist power structures that turn/ed these places, homeland or diaspora, into sites of unequal food access, when in reality, “race-related food inequities are embedded in processes and policies that negatively affect Black [and Indigenous] people and communities” (4). But these communities have never taken this narrative as fact, and all over, from ghettoized urban neighborhoods to rural and remote reservations, residents are constantly navigating and challenging the inequitable food systems imposed on them through what Ashanté M. Reese refers to as “quiet food refusals” (5). Movements of Black and Indigenous food and land sovereignty make space for individuals to hold these quiet refusals together, so that they might amplify themselves in collectivity.  This project is dedicated to—in the tradition of the Black and Indigenous food sovereignty activists I’m uplifting—defying the narratives of lack constructed by the WWOOFing site, not only by calling attention to individuals, organizations, and communities who are envisioning and creating sustainable, sovereign, and self-reliant food futures, but also recognizing the various ways that all of these distinct sites are interconnected in their missions and practices. 

WWOOFing taught me that the food farms produce is important, but only as much as the communities we can build and the wisdom there is to learn through connections to food. Food is medicine, both physically and spiritually, and it is also medicine in ways that I as a white settler can’t ever fully comprehend. I was lucky to make these realizations while WWOOFing, but WWOOFing does not necessarily bring these ideas to the forefront for its hosts and workers: these realizations were accessible to me only because I had been exposed to Black and Indigenous understandings of land and life prior to my work through Native Studies courses and additional research and conversations. However, at the Black and Indigenous food sovereignty initiatives highlighted in the map below, thinking about food not just as physical sustenance but as healing, liberatory medicine and crucial to community formation is central to their missions and operation. In the face of settler colonial and white supremacist narratives of lack and practices that seek to make said narrative a permanent reality, these individuals, organizations, and communities enact a defiant refusal of dependency. The work they do fights to re-understand the land, the communities they serve, and their current and future material realities as spaces of self-reliant abundance, with potential to grow and heal with time. By calling this project “Mapping Abundance,” I reaffirm their work as such and ask you, viewer, to continue to interrogate the spaces, people, lands, and communities you have written off as sites of nothingness.