We are profoundly grateful to you, our comrades, and all who have read, distributed, or submitted articles and artwork, and shared other creative offerings and ideas in expression and celebration of Black food sovereignty and our collective liberation.

We were overwhelmed by the warm reception of the inaugural edition, and we’re excited to continue building our Black agrarian futures with this second issue. We hope that you share our vision of LFFJ as a curated space for the exchange of ideas, creativity, and art. Here we continue to build on our ancestral legacy of self-determined storytelling as part of our collective resistance and resilience. 

This issue emerges in a moment of growing urgency and clarity, as land stewards, Black farmers, and food justice organizers continue to navigate compounding crises. It is within this context that we recommit to building and sharing practices rooted in care, resistance, and liberation.

With this issue, we invite you to freedom dream with us and imagine a just, healthy, well-fed, and liberated Black community. We invite you to imagine the regenerative engagement that is possible with loving interaction with the land, as we serve as stewards. We illustrate and elevate the symbiotic relationship between how we treat and heal the soil, how we feed our bodies, and how we support and build healthy communities, reconnecting to ancestral crops.

This issue includes pieces on speculative literature, restorative and healing recipes for body and soul, ancestral food traditions, and growing techniques that heal the land, feed our bodies, and, in the process, help us to build community health and wellness. More specifically, we discuss the importance of preparing, preserving, and sharing culturally significant recipes and ingredients. We include strategies for healing using traditional medicinals such as hibiscus, mushrooms, and other foraged plants, and at the same time, dissect the importance of grounding in processes like soil remediation. We also discuss the richness of seed beads as an African diasporan cultural reverence to support community resistance and resilience, used to adorn the body. One piece recognizes the cultural significance of collard greens as a critical crop to celebrate Black foodways. From the personal to collective, we share an understanding and celebration of the intergenerational knowledge of food production and consumption to encourage and support collective resilience. 

This journal is a mechanism that fosters conversation, as we believe in the importance of cross-pollination of ideas. It also serves as our space to practice and profess Black radical thought toward liberation praxis. As we look ahead, we remain committed to tending this journal as fertile ground for radical ideas, ancestral wisdom, and collective dreaming. We envision this space as a vessel for co-authored liberation praxis, welcoming many hands, many voices, and many visions.

In all ways, our hope is that these readings and artistic celebration beckon you to create, foster, and maintain intellectual and creative spaces that affirm our right to envision a resource-rich community of activists, academics, and all others who believe in Black food sovereignty. 

To every contributor, reader, artist, and organizer who poured into this issue, we thank you. To the founding editorial team who continues to steward this vision with care and clarity, we honor your labor. We invite all who resonate with this work to join us in dreaming, contributing, and building toward future issues.

‍

Dr. Monica White, Dr. Jasmine Jackson, Cicely Garrett, Dr. Jessica Walker, and Dara Cooper