Study Group
FIG began at one of our members' restaurants in 2014: Several of us gathered around a table, breaking bread, sharing ideas, and encouraging each other to make the radical practical in our food businesses.
For years, we’ve met regularly in person as a food workers’ study group, inspired by the legacy of formal and informal study and organized reading groups — a model core to the political education of so many radical organizations and communities, including the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords.
We dove deep into topics ranging from sustainable agriculture, to regenerative meat, to cooperative economics, to language justice in our industry, to indigenous food sovereignty.
-
Over the years, FIG has expanded and deepened what we mean when we talk about sustainability in food and hospitality. Given that food businesses stand at the intersection of the exploitative and destructive systems we must fight to change if we’re to save this planet and ourselves — and given that food is central to effective resistance, self-determination, and cultural preservation — we are committed to building alternative models and developing transformative practices that we can share out with the wider food industry.
We understand that the issues that we and our extended network of critical-thinking food colleagues have identified cannot be resolved without changing the actual structures we do the work within. We must go to the root of the issues, not just treat the branches. We understand that if we truly commit to going through this process of transformation aiming for a more equitable and sustainable business model, we will not end up with the same business nor the same position or power on the other end of it.
Study Group is open to anyone and everyone working within the food/hospitality space/industries who is down with the politics of the space.
In all our work — from the Food Security Program to Study Group — we move from a place of cooperation rather than competition; of solidarity not charity; of generosity not scarcity. We pursue a positive politic; embracing critique and channeling it into creative change, continuing to build new modes of living and working together understanding they will be imperfect and messy at times along the way.
-
— Inspire and radicalize our network.
— Facilitate relationships and meaningful connections.
— Deepen our culture and ecosystem.
— Cultivate a community of practice, experimentation, and sharing.
— Engage in real-world discussions of food system change — using our own lives, contexts, businesses to explore the practical application of our values and ideas.
— Develop creative concrete solutions to the issues we face in our work and communities.
— Create a nurturing environment for taking the risks and investing the resources required for food system transformation.escription
Join us for peer-to-peer teaching, mentorship, and co-learning with and for food and hospitality workers. Monthly Study Group meetings feature facilitated discussions, guest speakers, film screenings, and more.
Join our listserv stay up to date on readings, events and other news around the network.
WATCH
Resurfacing this relevant online teach in from June 2021:
This cross movement teach in offers historical analysis and calls to action for those interested in connecting their own ongoing activism and community work with the Palestinian struggle. Organized by Palestinian, Black, Indigenous, Boricua, Jewish and Asian American food and land workers, this event highlights concrete examples of solidarity past and present; shares movement demands and calls to action; and demonstrates how people working through food — chefs, farmers, writers, any and all of us — can address the ways it has been used to oppress as well as to resist, and how food can strengthen the connections between the Palestinian struggle and all anticolonial, antiracist movements.
First video is in English with American Sign Language. Second features simultaneous Spanish interpretation and American Sign Language.