1 Introduction
The Argentine philosopher, María Lugones, in the article entitled “Towards a Decolonial Feminism” (2010), continues her analysis initiated in “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System” (2007), about the wrappings that make up colonial capitalist modernity. Lugones (2010) proposes that we think of race, class, sexuality, and gender not only as homogeneous, atomic, and separable categories but rather as an intersection that fuses social, cosmological, economic, spiritual, and ecological organisation.
Although Lugones has not developed it much, in this chapter we aim to highlight the notion of ecological organisation (2010, 745), that is, the way colonisers conceive nature as a homogeneous sphere available for human domination and exploitation, which includes native populations and their cultures. We propose to discuss to what extent this notion helps us to understand the process of territorial expansion and the ethnocultural subjugation of Indigenous peoples, including their food practices, ecological devastation, and the establishment of the meat industry in Latin America as inseparable sources of speciesism originating from the colonial regime in the region.
Therefore, we aim to discuss the relationship between decoloniality and anti-speciesism in order to defend decolonial veganism from the “fractured locus” as a decolonial ecofeminist praxis. By fractured locus, Lugones means the relationship between oppression and resistance. Understanding veganism as a practice to fight speciesism, while being aware of other forms of oppression against humans and nonhumans, reveals other dimensions of growing food, cooking, and feeding that relate to the oppression of dominated individuals, and groups, as well as their resistance. As an example of this praxis of resistance in the Global South, we present the work of Regina Tchelly, a Brazilian chef, social entrepreneur, and community leader in the Favela Orgânica Project.
In this chapter, we aim to incorporate speciesism as a component of Lugones’ critical analysis of the effects of coloniality within the social organisation based
Although we understand veganism to be a necessary condition for confronting the globalising market of agriculture and food production, as well as for the overthrow of the colonial and epistemicidal regime, it is arguably not a sufficient condition, as our choices regarding consumption are part of a broader socioeconomic and environmental exploitation system, grounded in various forms of oppression.
The connection between Lugones and animal ecofeminism2 led us to a better understanding of the ecological organisation and its dynamics that make up a society marked not only by social inequalities but by the naturalisation of violent practices of colonial origin. Among them, we may highlight the invasion of land, environmental devastation, appropriation and privatisation of natural resources, and exploitation of human and nonhuman animals. These different forms of domination advance a monoculture based on colonisation of the culture and food production chain, and consequently on the colonisation of taste. Through these examples, we demonstrate how food production and consumption are permeated by intersecting violence against humans, animals, and nature.
In order to develop the relationship between decoloniality and anti-speciesism, we have structured the chapter in four parts. The first one addresses the rise of scholarly work on coloniality in 1990s Latin America, which led different authors to examine the power relations of colonialism and its long-standing effects. Then, we incorporate María Lugones’ critique and development of this concept, identifying gendered power relations intrinsic to coloniality.3 More specifically, we invoke her notion of the fractured locus
In the second part, we analyse the effects of coloniality beyond human beings. We state that speciesism is not only analogous to other isms of oppression, but it is also symbolically and materially organised to consolidate itself in line with other injustices, such as sexism and racism, and the transnational food industry, which exploits both humans and nonhumans as a characteristic of colonialism that we may call coloniality of species. In this sense, we adopt the definition of speciesism not only as a discrimination based on species, but as a structural oppression (Oliveira 2021). In other words, we understand structural speciesism as the recognition that the oppression against nonhuman animals is intertwined in a necessary and interdependent way with other isms of domination, among which we highlight colonialism, racism, and capitalism. Both colonialism and capitalism established a type of socio-racial organisation dependent on speciesism (Oliveira 2021). Regarding food industrialisation, we consider how taste is colonised and how it is related to a broader sense of monoculture (not only of the soil but also of the mind).
In the third part, we bring together decolonial theoretical approaches and anti-speciesism to help build an ecofeminist project for an ethical and just society. The fourth part demonstrates how Favela Orgânica’s project, from Regina Tchelly, is an example of resistance in the Global South through a decolonial ecofeminist anti-speciesist praxis, born in the fractured locus—meaning it is counter-hegemonic and not subordinated to systems of oppression, although surrounded by them.
Before moving on to the first part, we consider it important to briefly explain how we came to write this chapter. In July 2020, the 76-year-old Argentinian philosopher, María Lugones, passed away. In her honour, the Brazilian feminist philosopher, María Clara Dias, along with Letícia Gonçalves, Paula Gonzaga, and Suane Soares, compiled a book called Feminismos Decoloniais: Homenagem a María Lugones, published by Ape’ku, in Rio de Janeiro. Being invited to contribute to this book, we aimed to initiate a dialogue with Lugones’ legacy in order to investigate how her theories and contributions could improve the anti-speciesist ecofeminism we had already been developing.4
That is why we would like to stress the choices we have made in developing our arguments. Since we are committed to epistemological concerns regarding power relations, we consciously chose authors from the Global South to
2 The Concept of Coloniality and María Lugones’ Notion of Fractured Locus
During the 1970s and 1980s, great efforts were made by intellectuals and artists in Latin America to offer critical analytical tools for the period marked by the military coups that implanted dictatorships in the region.6 There was an attempt to understand the political influences and external economic interests in this anti-democratic process in the Latin American context. In addition, intellectual and artistic production has attempted to reread and assume new approaches to the historical process of the (de)formation of nation states, consolidation of socioeconomic dichotomies and hierarchies, questioning the attempt to naturalise poverty and hunger, and a radical critique of the fragility of the autonomy of Indigenous peoples and ethnic groups from colonisation to global and neoliberal capitalism.
This movement of contestation, resistance, and criticism can be found in various publications, mainly in the social sciences, but also in the arts, from the effort to recover memories and histories neglected by the ruling power through the production and creation of aesthetic-political ruptures.7 In this
The M/C Working Group consists of Latin American intellectuals located in several universities around Latin America, and it is part of a critical movement that, from the beginning, aimed to question the foundations of the colonial project that made the distinction between colonialism and coloniality fundamental. Both concepts are presented as integral parts of the so-called colonial project. To make this distinction, the Puerto Rican philosopher, Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2007), states that colonialism precedes coloniality and that the latter survives colonialism since its tentacles are beyond the outcome of traditional colonialism.
This distinction helps in understanding the deepening of authoritarianism in Latin America, commanded by military dictatorships. Moreover, it enables us to analyse the hegemonic historical process in the region and creates fissures for a counter-hegemonic reading, which in this context we call “decolonial”.8 We identify in the birth of the M/C Working Group the first records that lead to a conjugated analysis of the subjective structures, imaginaries, and epistemological colonisation that still pervade how Latin American societies were forcibly organised in the light of colonial thought.
Given this understanding, the thinker Aníbal Quijano (2005) proposes the concept of coloniality of power. This conceptual device helps us understand the structure of domination that has subjected Latin America, Africa, and Asia, based on the discourse and action of conquest. The term alludes to the invasion of the Other’s imaginary, that is, its Westernisation. More specifically, it refers to a discourse that inserts itself in the colonised world and reproduces itself in the locus of the coloniser. In this sense, the coloniser would destroy the Other’s imaginary, making it invisible and subordinating them while
María Lugones moves on from the understanding of gender in Quijano’s work. Considering Quijano’s proposal of the coloniality of power, Lugones (2007; 2008) analyses how his notions of gender and sexuality help us think about some fundamental intersectional aspects of the formulation of a decolonial perspective. To this end, Lugones proposes to think of a modern/colonial gender system to bridge a gap she identifies in thinking about “Third World” feminist women and feminists of colour.
In a critical dialogue with Quijano’s contributions, Lugones (2008) proposes the notion of gender coloniality. Through this concept, she explains how the dichotomous and hierarchical colonial logic cannot be thought of separately from the essentialising aspect of the gender binary (male/female) amidst Indigenous peoples and cultures. She thinks of coloniality in terms of the processes of subjectivation of colonised subjects reconfigured from dichotomous and hierarchical forms, not only the gender binary, but also the compulsory heterosexuality present in the colonial project. Along with racialisation and capitalist exploitation, she highlights that a process of dehumanisation has made the colonised subject inferior to “human beings”—or the colonial subject,9 under the rubric of the heterosexual white man. Lugones highlights the need to theorise these intersections, at the risk of ignoring inseparable aspects for many subjects oppressed by the colonial regime, whose project of power and knowledge compulsorily brought along the markers of race, class, gender, and sexuality as features of exclusion.
Lugones (2008) thus points out that Quijano’s theorisation of the modern/colonial project of gender is limited: he presupposes a patriarchal and heterosexual conceptualisation of the disputes around gender, which he does not question and, consequently, naturalises. In this way, Lugones proposes that gender should be problematised, starting from questioning its essentialisation because, just like race, gender is a fictitious category. Unlike Quijano, who states that an idea of is gender expressed in the naturalisation of binary sexual
Based on this critique, Lugones also highlights how (compulsory) heterosexuality strengthens the limited understanding of gender because heterosexuality, as we know it today, is a colonial construction allied with the myth of gender. Furthermore, heterosexuality is a forceful strategy that naturalises bodies based on biology, thus limiting the possible relationships between them. Lugones (2008, 93) states that “this heterosexuality has been consistently and harshly perverse, violent, degrading and has turned non-White people into animals and White women into reproducers of (White) Race and (bourgeois) Class”.
In “Towards a Decolonial Feminism”, Lugones (2010, 747) states that the oppression of subalternised women occurs through the “combined processes of racialisation, colonisation, capitalist exploration, and heterosexualism”. Considering this intersection that places coloniality in every aspect of life aids understanding of how subjectivity/intersubjectivity is formed and how these women act to resist in communities to build ways of being, valuing, and believing that are anti-capitalist and deviate from the colonial imaginary.
Lugones (2010) develops the notion of a fractured locus that manifests itself in the relationship between oppression and resistance. It is about the possibility of the processes of subjectivation escaping subjectification.10 From this, it is possible to think of other relations that, during adaptation and simultaneous opposition to the colonial regime, can lead to liberation. In the fractured locus, any minimal possibility of agency of the subaltern11 promotes other logics than that of oppression, giving rise to the multiplicity of realities that can escape colonial dichotomies and dualisms. When it is recognised that
For Lugones, the experiences in the community of daily interactions of women woven into social life resist the colonial difference. In this sense, subalternised women12 in the Global South13—bearing possible tensions in how they inhabit the colonial difference—can be fluent agents of their cultures. They can find ways to give visibility to the complex subjects simplified and reduced by the colonial vision. In this chapter, we seek experiences that demonstrate this fractured locus in a decolonial ecofeminist praxis. To this end, we develop the ecological aspects of coloniality, especially in relation to nonhuman animals.
3 Effects of Coloniality beyond Human Beings: Speciesism and the Food Industry
Lugones’ critical analysis reveals that coloniality expands beyond human minorities, to subject nonhuman lives to same systems of exploitation intensified by the demands of global developmental capitalism. Coloniality promotes food standardisation via multinational industries, which impacts both humans and nonhumans. At the same time in coloniality we also find forces of resistance that create, through an epistemological turn, colonial difference, fracturing its locus by asserting life over profit.
Maria Clara Dias, Suane Soares, and Letícia Gonçalves (2019) address the relationship between ecofeminism and decoloniality. They suggest that “beyond
a) the criticism of the supposed universal subject, markedly situated in a patriarchal, cisheterocentric, racist, elitist, urban, and, we add, speciesist logic; b) the location, therefore, of complex systems of oppression, domination, and exploitation, which intersect, limiting the implementation of an expanded concept of justice; c) the impossibility of hegemonic and homogeneous propositions of justice, without the singularised incorporation of the various moral concerned.
(Dias, Soares, and Gonçalves 2019, 195, authors’ translation)
Because of this, ecofeminism originating from the Global South tackles contextual issues of colonialism and needs to understand the centrality of epistemicide in the colonialist project. That is, colonisation is the fruit of a “coalition of forces of entities that represented European power to conquer and destroy epistemologies” (Dias, Soares, and Gonçalves 2019, 197, author’s translation). The ecological characteristics peculiar to the peoples and cultures that now form the Global South became the target of colonisation and imperialism. This region’s nature and tropical climate made possible the production of what mercantilism, capitalism, and, today, neoliberalism understand as inputs: nonhuman animals, plants, and seeds. Within this perspective, Dias, Soares, and Gonçalves highlight the links between ecofeminism and decoloniality:
ecofeminism and decolonial feminism are—although originating from different points of the globe—associable through a perception that colonisation does not work without the exploitation of nature and the exploitation of nature does not work without the colonisation of the people that inhabit certain regions. Which regions are these? Precisely the tropical regions. The so-called countries of the South make up the
(2019, 198, authors’ translation)massive, exploited population in the tropical and subtropical regions.
In this same sense, Vandana Shiva (1993) develops the concept of monocultures of the mind through “intellectual colonisation”, as local traditions of the colonisers are globalised and acquire a supposed universality, which consequently generates the erasure of local knowledge of the colonised. As she notes, “monocultures first inhabit the mind, and are then transferred to the ground. Monocultures of the mind generate models of production which destroy diversity and legitimise that destruction as progress, growth and improvement” (Shiva 1993, 7).
Monoculture of the mind is the metaphor through which diversity is eradicated like a weed. Just as dictatorial regimes exterminate dissident voices—which become the “disappeared”—intellectual colonialism eliminates subalternised pieces of knowledge to make them “disappear”, too. Born of a dominating and colonising culture, modern knowledge systems are colonising in themselves (Shiva 1993). By understanding the complex process of coloniality and its relationship with speciesism, we can highlight the attempts to escape colonial subjectivation, for example, through recogising and creatively promoting the decolonisation of taste.
3.1 The Colonisation of Taste and the Coloniality of Species
The colonial regime continues to produce new effects. Associated with globalist and developmental capitalism, translated into the idea of “progress”, it materialises in the globalised food industry’s attempt to appropriate an anti-speciesist agenda. As food consumption is important for the animal rights movement, the production of industrialised and nonanimal foods becomes of interest to this capitalism. When allegedly vegan and plant-based practices ally themselves with multinational food corporations, in turn, linked to the production of transgenic seeds and animals in agribusiness, vegan options become part of the standardised food offered on the shelves of hypermarket chains.
This is the promotion of a depoliticised vegan food standardisation, i.e., uncommitted to intra- and inter-species justice. The food imaginary is, in this way, colonised and appropriated globally. This can affect people’s interest in planting region and community specific plant varieties that are the main ingredients in many plant-based, diverse, creative, nutritious, and inexpensive recipes. Colonisation can boost food dependency when it leads to the abandonment of local plant-based foods, made of affordable and sustainable ingredients, originating in Indigenous cultures and local territories. It also impacts other ways of growing food—agroecology, organic family farming,
Fabio A. G. Oliveira, in La dieta sexista: contribuciones desde el ecofeminismo crítico para una decolonialización del paladar14 (2019), argues that the expansion of capitalism makes coloniality a regime that not only governs the exploitation, enslavement, commercialisation, and domination of life processes, but also emphasises the standardisation of different ways of living, reducing them to the economic interests of that same ideology. The place of nonhuman animals in this process suggests a specific type of capital, termed “animal capital” by Nicole Shukin (2009). This animal capital results from the biopolitical effort based on dualistic thinking, which, by recognising the differences of the Other, belittles them and authorises their objectification. The colonial regime, in this sense, takes advantage of the coloniality of power to deepen its forms of absolute domination over those who are called Other. Dehumanised humans and objectified nonhumans are vulnerable to this colonial onslaught. In the case of nonhuman animals, the result is the creation of animal capital, both symbolic and material. It represents the authorisation to use violence and a socio-cultural and industrial organisation of life, reinforcing what Barbara Noske (1989) has called the “animal-industrial complex”.
Therefore, in the colonial context, as stated by the Indigenous thinker Billy Ray Belcourt (2015), it is not possible to dissociate speciesism from other tactics and strategies of domination. For him, the biopolitical control of animal bodies in colonisation is an expression of speciesism, although White people did not use the term at the time of colonisation.
Belcourt (2015) suggests that we understand speciesism based on the concept of White supremacy, a political machinery based on territorial expansion and usurpation, in line with the exploitation and extermination of Indigenous and animal bodies. For this reason, decolonial thought makes a constitutive proposal for anti-speciesism: the anti-speciesist struggle “cannot exist within these fleshy and architectural spaces of whiteness through which Indigenous politico-economic structures are anachronized, and the totality of decolonisation is rendered unimaginable” (Belcourt 2015, 3).
According to Belcourt (2015), under the pillars of White supremacy food cultures are imposed by colonisation and resized by colonial capitalism as an exclusive way to homogenise the relationship of colonised peoples and territories with food. This process can be understood through both the appropriation
In this process, the appropriation of animal bodies and seeds is a form of domination and control of production. Genetic techniques applied to the reproduction and growth of animals and the patenting of seeds gradually violate rural and riverbank populations’ the right to cultivate crops. Such people still resist the model of social organisation imposed by neoliberal capitalism, which is eminently urban, global, and White.
Thus, an imaginary of progress is decisive for promoting the monoculture of the mind, which establishes a hierarchy between cultures and organises production and consumption chains. It annihilates the knowledge and cultural practices of Indigenous peoples and nations of the Global South. This model reinvents forms of domination of historically vulnerable groups, above all, due to hunger and misery. Oliveira (2020) calls this an epistemicidal regime: a social organisation based on violence combined with the domination of territories and the annihilation of peoples, nations, and their cultures. This regime is understood as practices that structure the marginality of knowledge that escapes from Eurocentric and Global North production and becomes imbricated in the production of stereotypes that place certain bodies and subjects at the margins of knowledge and power. The epistemicidal regime is consolidated through coloniality in its multiple forms and expressions (Oliveira 2020).
The epistemicidal regime is the consolidation of the monoculture of the mind. Vandana Shiva (2003) perceives this as a capitalist strategy of the technology of precariousness, which disseminates new practices for incorporation into the social dynamics of global power relations still based on the racialisation of particular peoples and ethnicities. The technology of precariousness, far from revolutionising the world and implementing the good life, legitimises the relations of domination imposed by colonial violence. We need to break with this perception to be able to imagine and realise other possible worlds and absolutely creative resistances (Oliveira 2020).
Thus, at least two fields of dispute flirt with what we call the coloniality of the species. On the one hand, the openly speciesist perspective rejects veganism and any manifestation of anti-speciesist struggle; on the other, a
When veganism is allied to this imaginary of progress of food multinationals, it may break some barriers of access to vegan food. Still, it does not untie the knots of the colonial system. It may even contribute to intensifying the oppression of women from the Global South, swallowed up by the precarious reproductive and productive forms of work of the globalising developmentalist model. This helps to deepen the system of colonial domination: the bodies of women made vulnerable by the intersections of the system of oppression, in urban spaces abandoned by state policies, may become instruments for the propagation of the monoculture of the mind and of an industry which profits from the deepening of precarious conditions of life, of humans, and nonhumans. Colonial domination includes the exploitation of female nonhuman animal bodies as reproductive machines in factory farms.
Faced with this scenario of colonial domination of taste and the transformation of diverse local food cultures by the food industry, associated with the precarisation of labour relations—tactics located within the epistemicidal regime—it is important to seek, in the decolonial proposal and in the ecofeminist anti-speciesist struggle, food strategies of resistance which shake up the relations of domination and exploitation in the Global South. It is essential to ensure the protection of human and nonhuman lives through a decolonial critique that is deeper than what Lugones has named ecological organisation.
4 Towards a Decolonial Ecofeminist Anti-Speciesism
Suppose we understand that women and other political minorities in the Global South, through their modes of transformation and organisation of society, stand up to the global capitalist system sustained by the tactics of expansive colonial oppression. We can reflect from them and with them, in a creative and recreative way, on another kind of anti-speciesism that arises in association with animal ecofeminism, in the contravention of an epistemicidal regime.
As the philosopher Marti Kheel (2019, 40) points out, the “main form of contact that most people have with animals is on their plates”, so anti-speciesism also involves decolonising food. The market and processed foods play a fundamental role in people’s diet today, and colonialism reaches this sphere by strongly influencing what should be produced and consumed. Many typical “Brazilian” dishes reveal the colonial mark in our culture, such as those centred
Motivated by resistance to the colonisation of taste, we can affirm that Non-Conventional Food Plants (PANC s in the Brazilian Portuguese acronym),15 or as many popular and community initiatives in Latin America have suggested, the “bush to eat”,16 are an example of historical resistance. Besides guaranteeing nutrients that plants from the conventional commercial circuit cannot supply, the bushes that can be eaten “have medicinal properties, and their bioactive compounds contribute to the promotion of health. In addition to being plants with the potential to generate income, they are a great path to adequate, healthy and responsible food” (Callegari and Matos Filho 2017, authors’ translation).
Edible bushes are not part of the everyday diet of many groups or communities, especially in urban areas. This means that although they can be eaten, they are not produced and marketed on a large scale. This concept includes the nonconventional edible parts of plants that are part of this production, commercialisation, and consumption circuit, such as banana blossoms, banana peels, and carrot and cauliflower leaves.
Bushes that can be eaten value the biodiversity and knowledge of regional and/or local cultures besides contributing to strengthening food sovereignty, food and nutrition security, and, ultimately, to guaranteeing the right to adequate food (Callegari and Matos Filho 2017). Thus, these plants help popularise veganism and have a low financial cost.17
Veganism gains prominence in this concept, but to remain politicised, it must go beyond the absence of animal products, such as meat, eggs, milk,
The diet centred around meat, dairy products, eggs, and derivatives is the most destructive to the planet, additionally impacting the lives of Indigenous peoples (United Nations Environment Programme 2021). Greenhouse gas emissions from the production that maintains this diet is a central factor in the 1.5° C increase in the Earth’s temperature.19 Other factors related to the diet centred around meat, eggs, and dairy products are namely the burning of fossil fuels—on which the transport of animals and the cultivation of grains and cereals that feeds them depends—and the destruction of tropical forests. Data from the National Institute for Space Research (INPE 2019) indicate a consolidated annual rate of 7,536 km² of deforestation in the Amazon in 2018, an increase of 8.5% compared to 2017. Brazil is the country that uses the largest quantity of agricultural poisons in the world (Felipe 2018). To aggravate this scenario, from January to September 2019, the Brazilian federal government approved the use of 325 new pesticides (Damasio 2019).
Although we understand veganism to be a necessary condition for confronting the globalising market of agriculture and food production, as well as for the overthrow of the colonial and epistemicidal regime, it is not a sufficient condition, as our choices regarding consumption are part of a broader socioeconomic and environmental exploitation system, grounded in various forms of oppression. As Esther Alloun (2015) states, veganism is one step in
[v]eganism is about reducing suffering and exploitation, and taking a stand against unjust socioeconomic arrangements. At first glance, therefore, it should not be difficult to expand our ability to care for and act on behalf of trees, forests, mountains, ecosystems, and other terrestrial life.
From this political perspective, individual practices, in which food choices are included, have meaning. While veganism—as an individual choice—puts into practice the model of the world free of oppression, it does not change oppressive structures. Withdrawing from these systems of oppression is essential but insufficient, so veganism needs to be more than a lifestyle and consumption. In other words, collective political actions are needed to hold political, economic, and cultural systems accountable for oppression (Alloun 2015).
As ecofeminists, such as Trish Glazebrook (2016), point out, the climate crisis disproportionately affects countries of the Global South, women, and other political minorities. Despite expressing critical ethical and political stances, individual choices alone do not adequately address the structural problems inherent in the colonised imaginary still in force in Latin America. There is an urgent need for policies oriented by care practices of community inspiration, which contest hegemonic colonial and oppressive structures.
5 Resistances in the Global South: a Praxis for a Decolonial Ecofeminist Anti-Speciesism
In the Global South, resistance to the processes of colonisation and commodification of human and nonhuman life through counter-hegemonic narratives of non-subordination originate in the fractured locus (Lugones 2010). Such narratives allow us to rethink the interrelations between life forms in a nondualistic and nonhierarchical way, which we understand as a decolonial ecofeminist anti-speciesist praxis.
Narratives based on the experiences of subalternised individuals and groups, in general, are fundamental in thinking about another praxis and conceiving other realities in the face of the hegemony of coloniality that constantly renews its apparatus of self-maintenance. When such narratives are structured
Moreover, narratives help to think of what Linda Alcoff (2016) calls a “new language of liberation”, that is, a decolonial language that takes into account the demand for diversity that social movements have presented to academia. For research to be liberating, traditional academic methods, closed in on themselves and historically committed to silencing and distorting investigations into the multiplicities of human groups’ experiences, are insufficient.
Based on this importance of narratives to thinking of creative languages, we introduce the resistance praxis of the Favela Orgânica Project, initiated by Regina Tchelly in 2011. Regina Tchelly moved from the Estate of Paraíba to Rio de Janeiro when she was 20 years old. As a Northeasterner woman,20 she dreamed of better living conditions. For the first eleven years, she was a domestic worker. Noticing food waste in open markets, she started to think about a project against food waste. Combining work, motherhood, and life demands, she took cooking classes and without any funding put her dream into practice. Nowadays, as a recognised Brazilian chef, Regina Tchelly gives lectures and workshops in different states and other countries.
The Favela Orgânica Project has its headquarters in the communities of Babilônia and Chapéu Mangueira in Rio de Janeiro. Its objectives are to “change people’s relationship with food, avoid waste, care for the environment, and show that it is possible to end hunger” (Favela Orgânica 2020, [n.p.], authors’ translation). As for its mission, the project promotes awareness about the stages of the food cycle to create “environmentally responsible and healthy eating habits and practices for families and communities” (Favela Orgânica
Regina Tchelly carries several social markers that link her to oppressed social groups—woman, Northeasterner, poor, non-White, from the periphery. When such a woman puts into practice a community feeding project focusing on the complete use of edible vegetables at a low cost, an action against the logic of capital and coloniality emerges in this fractured place. But Regina Tchelly did not become active in isolation; her anti-colonial way of being, valuing, and believing is born in community interrelationships and needs them to move forward. In the words of Lugones (2010, 754):
One does not only resist gender coloniality. One resists from within a way of understanding the world and living in it that is shared and that can understand one’s actions, thus providing recognition. Communities, rather than individuals, make it possible to do; it is done with someone else, not in individualistic isolation. The passing from mouth to mouth, hand to hand of lived practices, values, beliefs, ontologies, space-time, and cosmologies constitutes a single one. The production of the everyday within which one exists produces the self, as it provides particular and meaningful clothing, food, economies and ecologies, gestures, rhythms, habitats, and senses of space and time. But it is important that these ways are not just different. They include the affirmation of life over profit, communalism over individualism, “being” over enterprise, beings in relation rather than dichotomously divided into hierarchically and violently ordered fragments. These ways of being, valuing, and believing have persisted in the resistant response to coloniality.
Favela Orgânica encourages creativity, recreation of recipes, and the diversity of dishes based on popular and accessible ingredients, preferably organic. It is food that goes against the nutricide21 that is the hallmark of the standardised
Although the community work of Favela Orgânica prioritises plant-based food and food without animal ingredients, it does not always use words that we import from the Global North, such as “vegetarian” and “vegan” food. Through this linguistic strategy, the project moves away from the discursive dualisms built around what is vegan and nonvegan food. The central concern is the preparation of healthy and nutritious food with the full use of vegetables without pesticides and chemical additives, because transnational food companies make cheap but ultra-processed and unhealthy foods available to poor people in the Global South. The nonuse of words crystallised in the discourse to divide people into groups and build hierarchies (omnivores versus vegetarians; vegetarians versus vegans) can provide us with tools to contextually rethink the body’s relationship with food, encouraging us to reconfigure practices and
In the colonial logic, plant foods are divided in a hierarchical, dualistic manner: the parts that can be prepared and those that are discarded (peels, seeds, stalks, etc.). Industrialised foods have countless wrappers to be discarded one by one until the edible part is reached. The packaging preserves such foods, often transported from one continent to another, and ensures they are safe for consumption for long periods. Favela Orgânica confronts this approach as it prepares fresh food distributed to the community, generally grown on the outskirts of the city, and assumes that all parts of vegetables can compose the meal. Through multiple preparations, vegetables can be used in diverse dishes and recipes.
In this nonanimal and decolonial food praxis, there is no room for waste: everything can be used in some way to nourish the human being; nutrition is not restricted to the stage of food intake but involves the whole collective process of food preparation, which nourishes relations in the community, especially among women, being an expression of caring relations. To avoid wasting food, creativity becomes central to the Favela Orgânica Project, giving place to the imagination and inspiring new combinations of ingredients. This creative cooking enriches the food diversity with new forms, textures, appearances, smells, and tastes.
The production of everyday life, with creative ways of being, valuing, cooking, and eating, promoted by Favela Orgânica and Regina Tchelly’s knowledge shared with other women, subvert the imposition of colonised imaginaries. Considering the praxis of marginalised subjects, we can identify narratives, affectivities, and strategies presenting emancipation paths that escape the colonial and capitalist system imposed on a portion of humanity and nonhuman beings and nature in general. The unjust economic logic of profit is replaced by practices linked to the logic of care. As Donna Haraway (1995), Ariel Salleh (1994), and others have pointed out, we must pay attention to the agency present in nonhegemonic localised knowledge (historically hidden by academically situated knowledge), to the knowledge born out of devalued experiences of oppression. Through this we can move away from the conditions of precariousness and the epistemicidal regime structured and reiterated by oppressive modern/colonial hegemony.
6
In this chapter, we have presented the intersectional decolonial perspective of María Lugones and emphasised that speciesism is an essential category of analysis to understand colonial processes still in force in Latin America. To demonstrate this, we drew on the writings of animal ecofeminist authors who informed us of the need to critically examine speciesism’s theoretical and practical implications (praxis). The connection between Lugones and animal ecofeminism led us to better understand ecological organisation and its dynamics. Latin American societies are marked not only by social inequalities but also by the naturalisation of violent practices of colonial origin. These practices include the invasion of land and environmental devastation, appropriation and privatisation of natural resources, and the exploitation of human and nonhuman animals. Considered together, these practices have advanced a monoculture based on the colonisation of cultural aspects, the food production chain, and consequently in the colonisation of taste. We see the need to elaborate a decolonial anti-speciesist ecofeminism inspired by forms of resistance from the Global South. Such a perspective directs us to a necessarily anti-speciesist veganism, forged in the struggle for social justice of the Latin American ecofeminist and decolonial matrix.
Through the discussions presented here, we hope to contribute to imagining other futures for humans and other-than-humans in which lives are not constantly kept in precarious conditions and considered ungrievable (Butler 2015). Many lives indeed move in the counterflow of colonial strategies and global capitalist developmentalism through community resistance, attentive to the intersecting systems of oppression and the destructive effects of a world organisation based on hierarchical value dualisms. Against the food conglomerates that promote the consumption of ultra-processed foods, against the multinational companies that manufacture so-called vegan foods, may we be inspired by the work of Regina Tchelly and Favela Orgânica, to contribute to developing a future planetary cohabitation in which all lives are equally liveable.
Here, the use of the term “Third World” is intended to provoke an epistemological tension. Although it has been used as an insult, to belittle the contributions of the Global South, it seemed important to us to resituate the term at this time as a historical mark of contempt for the knowledge of the Global South, especially of impoverished countries marked by colonialism.
By animal ecofeminism we mean ecofeminism that takes the protection of individual animals’ lives as central to anti-speciesism, addressing questions related to veganism as an ethical and political matter. It recognises the effects of animal oppression on the lives of individual animals without ignoring the intersection with other systems of oppression that affect different subalternised groups.
The M/C Working Group is part of a critical movement that distinguishes colonialism and coloniality. Both concepts are part of the colonial project, and coloniality continues to exist after colonialism.
Based on this investigation, we presented a shorter version of our arguments online in the Animal Futures conference that took place in Estonia in May 2021. After that, we were kindly invited by one of the organisers, Kadri Aavik, to contribute to this book.
Like Brazilian Portuguese, our mother tongue.
Military coups in Latin America took place in 1964 in Brazil, in 1966 in Argentina, in 1973 in Chile, and in 1976 in Uruguay.
We highlight the following works: (1) Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), by the Brazilian thinker Paulo Freire; (2) Las venas abiertas de América Latina [Open Veins of Latin America] (1971), by the Uruguayan thinker Eduardo Galeano—banned in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay during the military dictatorships in these countries; (3) Identity and Utopia in Latin America (1989), by the Peruvian thinker Anibal Quijano. Among the artists, we highlight the Brazilian singers and composers Chico Buarque, Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Ferreira Gullar, and Nara Leão. The filmmaker Glauber Rocha and the playwright Augusto Boal are artists who produced the “art of resistance to the dictatorship” and therefore spent years in exile as a consequence of political persecution.
Decolonial is understood as a fundamental epistemological movement for the critical and utopian renewal of the applied human and social sciences in Latin America in the 21st century: the contextualisation and radicalisation of the postcolonial argument in the continent through the notion of “decolonial turn” (Maldonado-Torres, 2007; 2017). As the result of myriad theoretical influences, the M/C Working Group updates the critical tradition of Latin American thought, offers historical reinterpretations, and problematises old and new issues for the continent. It defends the decolonial option—epistemic, theoretical, and political—to understand and act in the world, marked by the permanence of global coloniality at different levels of personal and collective life. We believe this perspective helps us better understand both animal and food production in Latin America.
In this sense, we understand that the colonial subject is not restricted to the coloniser but refers to everyone who reflects this ideology until today.
As Lugones (2010, 747) notes, “[t]he coloniality of gender enables me to understand the oppressive imposition as a complex interaction of economic, racializing and gendering systems in which every person in the colonial encounter can be found as a live, historical, fully described being. It is as such that I want to understand the resister as being oppressed by the colonizing construction of the fractured locus. But the coloniality of gender hides the resister as fully informed as a native of communities under cataclysmic attack. So, the coloniality of gender is only one active ingredient in the resisters’ history. In focusing on the resister at the colonial difference I mean to unveil what is obscured.”
For Lugones, the notion of the subaltern designates a way of understanding oppression through the combined processes of racialisation, colonisation, capitalist exploitation, and heterosexuality.
Lugones (2010) draws attention to the fact that care must be taken even when employing the terms “man” and “woman”, as using colonial language results in an erasure of the anti-colonial reality.
We follow this understanding: “The idea of the Global South is political and not geographical, although it is connected with the spatial question, and is related to the historical trajectory of each country, continent and region. Thus, the terms Global South, Southern countries, and other variants refer to the peoples and regions that have suffered from the colonising processes imposed by white Eurocentric peoples, mainly from what is called maritime expansion. The idea of the South is also related to climatic, racial, religious, patriarchal, cultural, and technological issues, among others.” (Dias, Soares and Gonçalves 2019, 197, authors’ translation).
“The sexist diet: contributions from critical ecofeminism to a decolonialisation of taste” (authors’ translation).
PANC s are an academic classification that fails to recognise that some plants have always been part of the culture of some peoples, ethnic groups, and communities. Thus, by using the term “non-conventional” they reinforce a paradigm of neglect of longstanding popular knowledge, strengthening a hegemonic academic type of knowledge dissociated from knowledge production outside the university walls.
The term has been used by some educational institutions’ initiatives in teaching, research, and extension, e.g., the No Cruelty Workshops, offered by the Laboratory of Environmental and Animal Ethics (LEA/UFF). See: http://lea.eco.br/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Teaser-matosdecomer.jpg
Ora-pro-nóbis, for example, is an easy plant to grow and a rich source of protein. Other PANC s include the Brazilian plants azedinha, aroeira, capuchinha, moringa, taioba, and almeirão-roxo.
For more on the interconnection between critical gender and animal studies, see Kuura Irni (Chapter 7) and Sanna Karhu (Chapter 8) in this volume.
“Cattle and buffalo herds occupy the first place in methane gas emissions on the planet, with 1.3 billion heads around the world, each individual emitting at least 140 g of methane, an estimated total of 182,000 tons a day, or 66 million tons a year. These emissions do not include the gases released by one billion pigs and 25 million poultry, only the methane gas emitted by cattle and buffaloes.” (Felipe 2018, 129, authors’ translation).
Migration from the Northeast to the Southeast and South of Brazil is the reality of many families, including young women, who migrate in search of a better life in big cities like São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. This is a historical movement of migration in Brazil spanning many decades in the 20th century, especially during the dictatorship. This movement was significantly reduced in the last decades, with the social policies of the most recent left-wing governments led by the Workers’ Party (2002–2015). As a group, Northeasterners still suffer prejudice in the Southeast, where people consider themselves more developed and civilised, even though such migrations were fundamental for the growth and enrichment of Southeastern cities.
Nutricide, or food genocide, is a term coined by the thinker Llaila Afrika in Nutricide: The Nutritional Destruction of the Black Race (2013). Afrika highlights concerns not only about the conditions of access to food, but the contours that make food security and autonomy effective. In this context, we cite the Vigitel 2018—Black Population survey, published by the Ministry of Health (Brazil, 2019), which brought to light the food vulnerability of the Black population in Brazil, with regard to the consumption of vegetables, legumes, and seeds, but also their greater exposure to pesticides.
The Favela Orgânica Project is one among many models of cooperation led and coordinated by women in the favelas (slums) of the city of Rio de Janeiro. By understanding this as a collective and collaborative form of resistance, we do not intend to affirm that other trajectories cannot be understood in this way. In a world marked by incisive oppression, the very existence of bodies deviating from the norms and powers in force is in itself a way of resisting.
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