Today we’d like to introduce you to Tanya Kerssen.
Hi Tanya, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today.
I am French Canadian and grew up on an island in the St. Lawrence Seaway in Québec before moving to Minnesota as a teenager. I often say my parents were peasants–which is a compliment of the highest order: self-sufficient; joyful; endlessly curious; always tinkering, building, experimenting; and with a strong orientation to cultivating the land and living in right relationship with Nature. I’m not sure if they are my primary influences for becoming an advocate for food justice, food sovereignty, and above all, peasants’ rights to land—but they helped plant the seed, to be sure.
As I got older, driven by the curiosity (and love of books) that they instilled in me, I started reading and traveling and ultimately developed a better (still evolving) understanding of how histories of colonialism, patriarchy, racial capitalism, and imperialism transformed our societies and ecologies. Early in my professional life, I decided to dedicate my career to supporting the social movements—especially those led by Indigenous, migrant, and other marginalized or dispossessed peoples—fighting to defend, reclaim, or recreate land-based livelihoods, cultures, and communities.
I’ve worn many hats and had many jobs over the years—from baker and restaurant worker to researcher, writer, translator, educator, and human rights observer. These experiences shaped the path that eventually brought me to Real Food Media, where I am now a co-director. Real Food Media was founded by two fiercely talented activists in the food movement, Anna Lappé and Christina Bronsing-Lazalde twelve years ago, and I was invited to join the organization, along with the brilliant cultural organizer Tiffani Patton, about six years ago.
Technically speaking, what our small but mighty team does is multimedia and communication strategy in support of food and farming organizations. The spirit of our work, though, is to help nourish a global movement for liberation, justice, and joy as a counterweight to immeasurable suffering in the world. I am endlessly grateful and humbled to play a small part in that.
Can you talk to us about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
The greatest challenges in this work by far are spiritual ones: How do we nourish community, connection, and pleasure in the face of all these forces hell-bent on profiting from our fragmentation and despair? I am informed by a kind of academic political economy tradition that is very good at explaining what has gone wrong—and I’m so grateful to have those intellectual tools to make sense of all this gloom.
But our task is not only to analyze to understand, it’s to fortify ourselves collectively through empathy and daily acts of care. That is, I think, what humanity is called to. And even though I work in the tech-saturated field of communications, I know that collective care doesn’t happen on our phones. Ok, that’s not entirely true: please show care for your fellow humans by texting “ceasefire” to 51905 and applying pressure on your representatives to de-escalate the military assault on Gaza.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I’ll highlight just a few of the projects Real Food Media worked on this year in partnership (always in partnership) with some incredibly inspiring people and organizations. Together with The Midwest Farmers of Color Collective, we co-produced two pilot episodes of their new podcast called Growing Liberation. These farmers break every mold of the dominant narrative around farming in the US (and in the Midwest especially)—they are diverse, wildly creative, and powerful storytellers. Please check them out!
Earlier this year, we supported the production and design of a participatory research report called “Procuring Food Justice: Grassroots Solutions for Reclaiming Our Public Supply Chain” in partnership with the HEAL Food Alliance and Food Chain Workers Alliance. This is a unique publication, where workers and farmers get to share their insights and policy recommendations for making supply chains more resilient, transparent, and accountable. The last project I’ll mention is one we’re working on now—it’s a media partnership with La Vía Campesina, an international confederation composed of peasant organizations from 88 countries.
A Real Food Media writer/correspondent and photojournalist documented their recent international convening that took place in Bogotá, Colombia. Among other things, they held their first international meeting of LGBTQIA peasants there. We’ll be sharing audio-visual stories from that experience in the coming year.
Do you have recommendations for books, apps, blogs, etc?
I am always reading multiple books and listening to several podcasts, sometimes literally at the same time lol. I’ll try to be selective, but here are some that are lighting up my neuro-pathways (and creating new ones) right now and in recent years.
“Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice” by Rupa Marya and Raj Patel
“The Nutment’s Curse: Parable for a Planet in Crisis” by Amitav Ghosh
“The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine” by Rashid Khalidi
“Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World” by Naomi Klein
“Right Story, Wrong Story: Adventures in Indigenous Thinking” by Tyson Yunkaporta
“Incubation: A Space for Monsters” by Bhanu Kapil
Follow on Substack: Rising with Yasmin Khan; and From the Desk of Alica Kennedy
Follow on Patreon: evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace
Follow on Instagram: @adriennemareebrown and @rowenwhite
Food, farming, culture & politics podcasts I love:
Radical Nourishment podcast with episodes like “Nourishing Black Food Sovereignty in Bronzeville, Ohio” and “After Surgery, Food is Gender Affirming Care”, https://foodculture.org/radical-nourishment
Surf and Turf podcast features a sea urchin diver, oyster harvester, seafood processing worker, and other stories from our aquatic food system: https://www.surfandturfpodcast.com/
Growing Liberation: https://soundcloud.com/mfcc-growing-liberation
Maintenance Phase: https://www.maintenancephase.com/
Conspirituality: https://www.conspirituality.net/
Real Food Media podcasts: https://soundcloud.com/realfoodmedia
Contact Info:
- Website: www.realfoodmedia.org
- Instagram: @realfoodmedia
- Facebook: @realfoodmediaproject
- Twitter: @realfoodmedia
- SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/realfoodmedia
