AS WE GUIDE THE LAND, FOOD, AND FREEDOM JOURNAL INTO ITS SECOND YEAR, ONE QUESTION HAS GROUNDED OUR WORK: What does it mean to build a publication that not only advances ideas but also equips people to transform conditions on the ground? Throughout our first year, we spent a bunch of time shaping the journal’s voice and clarifying where we stand. We built circles of accountability through our editorial leadership board, editorial board, and wisdom council, each helping us remain rooted in our values. Together, they help us cultivate a space for reclamation, kinship, intellectual rigor, healthy debate, and creative expansiveness in service of Black food sovereignty and liberation.

That question of purpose was honed in the spring of 2026, when our project manager, Keesa Johnson, and I met with members of our wisdom council: Mama Asantewaa Harris, Baba Malik Yakini, and Mama Savi Horne. Across our conversations, one message surfaced repeatedly: the journal must hold theory and action in relationship with one another. Theory without action loses its power. Action without theory loses its direction.

This issue emerges from that call, seeking work that helps us understand our Black struggles while also helping us discern the paths forward. The scholarship in these words informs action and simultaneously action deepens scholarship. In this second year, we recommit ourselves to publishing work that strengthens that relationship and equips our communities with tools for both reflection and movement. That commitment models my own journey into Black food sovereignty and liberation work.

Long before I encountered terms like “food justice” or “food sovereignty,” I experienced their triumphs and triggers in real life. My late father, who remained incarcerated throughout most of my childhood, insisted that my siblings and I attend a Black-led school. In third grade, they put me at the Benjamin Banneker Charter Public School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There, my Haitian dad’s teachings about our people’s revolution and liberation found a place naturally within their curriculum. There, I learned the meaning of mutual aid long before anyone attached a name to it. One of my teachers regularly brought bags of her children’s clothes for my siblings and me because she knew my mother carried the weight of raising us alone.

Outside the classroom, those lessons continued. I accompanied my grandma to food pantries. At first, embarrassment followed me through those doors. I found comfort in the familiar sound of music drifting from someone’s radio tuned to W.I.L.D., in neighbors greeting one another warmly, and in the sense that I was part of something larger than my own circumstances. We shared a struggle, but we also shared the strength to carry on. My Aunt Diana beefed up those lessons through her affirmations around us being rooted in our Black identity and through her own leadership and with projects connected to the Pan African Children’s Fund. She showed me what Black global solidarity looked like in practice.

Yet alongside those resistances stood hardship. I watched my mother stretch every dollar so we could travel to New Jersey and visit my father in prison. I ate cereal from pantry boxes and spotted beetles floating in the milk. I watched stress wear on my Aunt Diana as she carried immense responsibility as a Black woman committed to her community. Her death at forty years old taught me a harsh lesson on boundaries. I grew up in Cambridge, one of the country’s most well-resourced communities, yet I still witnessed Black families, including my own, navigating Section 8, food stamps, WIC, environmental racism, gentrification, and more.

Those experiences shaped my understanding of food long before they shaped my work now. In high school, while enrolled in a vocational culinary program, I decided that food would guide my path. I helped launch a program that packed weekend meals for younger students. By my senior year of high school, I faced a crossroads. I left an internship at a James Beard Award-winning restaurant and declined culinary school. Instead, I enrolled in the Food Studies program at Syracuse University as its first declared major. 

I studied the writings of Jessica Gordon Nembhard, Dr. Monica White, and Ashanté Reese. I immersed myself in the histories of the Black Panther Party, Fannie Lou Hamer, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, and countless others. Simultaneously, I stayed connected to my home, partnering with the public health department to bring Haitian poule en sauce onto the school lunch menu. I worked with food rescue organizations to source fresh produce and organize free farmers markets in the projects in Cambridge. I climbed onto trucks myself, collecting surplus food from Trader Joe’s and Star Market.

As my studies deepened, however, my practice began to slow. At the time, I did not yet understand that action and theory could coexist. I treated them as separate commitments rather than complementary ones.

After graduation, I entered policy work. I helped secure passage of a local ordinance that doubled SNAP purchasing power at farmers markets. That win mattered, but life continued to unfold around it. As a first-generation college graduate, I navigated early adulthood while carrying the grief of my Dad, my aunt, my grandmother, and grandfather. A move to Chicago led me into education justice and eventually back into food policy. Over time, burnout accumulated. Depression masked by high-performance followed.

The fights and struggles that once grounded me began to feel distant. I convinced myself that the problem might have been the low salaries, so I pursued more fancy job opportunities. The disconnection remained. I wondered whether harmful workplace leadership had driven me away, only to discover those dynamics elsewhere in even greater measure. Years passed before I found my way back to the question that first brought me here: What do we owe one another in the face of Black struggle?

The answer never rested solely in study. It never rested solely in action. It lived in the relationship between the two.

As I step into this journal’s second year as editor, that lesson guides me through this role. I return to the balance that shaped my upbringing: witnessing, doing, and learning. In curating these words in this issue, I actively committed to honoring that balance. I want this journal to hold rigorous scholarship alongside the wisdom of people building and succeeding on the ground. I want readers to encounter ideas that challenge them and stories that move them toward action.

Most of all, I want the Land, Food, and Freedom Journal to remain a place where theory and practice meet in service of Black food sovereignty and liberation, by any means necessary. 

With love and commitment,

ASHIA AUBOURG

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