bell hooks, Foodways, and Regeneration

Cultivation and Nourishment: Connecting "Touching the Earth" to the Regeneration Symposium 

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Bell hooks believed that real, radical love was, as Demond Hill writes in his chapter “An In the Meantime, In Between Time, Type of Love,” “a revolutionary act, a commitment to honoring our collective liberation.” In “Touching the Earth,” hooks shows us that this same revolutionary love must extend downward into soil, into seed, and into the quiet labor of hands that grow things. 

Bell hooks opens “Touching the Earth” with a Lorraine Hansberry quote about wanting to live and why:

I wish to live because life has within it that which is good, that which is beautiful, and that which is love. Therefore, since I have known all these things, I have found them to be reason enough and -- I wish to live. Moreover, because this is so, I wish others to live for generations and generations and generations and generations.

-Lorraine Hansberry, 

To be Young, Gifted, and Black

This desire, hooks argues, depends on something most of us have been taught to overlook: our relationship to the land beneath us. Our connection to earth is inseparable from our relationship to ourselves, our communities, and our collective well-being.

The Garden as Restoration

hooks’s essay draws on Black agrarian history to make a case that feels both historical and urgent. hooks grew up watching her grandfather walk rows of tomatoes and corn in Kentucky, watching her grandmother tend a backyard garden heavy with beans and sweet potatoes. She remembers that pride. Through the most physical act possible, her grandfather and grandmother made radical love visible, proving their lives—and the lives of those they fed—were worthy of continuance. The earth received that love. It gave it back as food. 

She also traces what happened when Black families left the South during the Great Migration—how city life, with its industrial rhythms and nowhere to grow anything, severed people from that kind of knowing. The body became something to manage rather than inhabit. The earth became something other people owned. hooks understands that older intimacy, the body pressing seeds into dark soil, is a kind of spiritual wound that shows up in how we relate to ourselves, to each other, and to whether we believe we deserve to flourish at all. 

This is exactly where radical love enters. Hill describes radical love as beginning inward—with the forgotten child inside us, the one “full of innocence, curiosity, and boundless imagination”—before moving outward into action and solidarity. hooks is doing something remarkably similar. She is asking us to remember a kind of reciprocity we were taught to abandon: that we belong to the earth, and the earth belongs to us in return. Reconnecting with the land is akin to reconnecting with that earlier, truer self before the world taught us, as Hill puts it, “to conform, doubt, and fear.” 

Learning to Truly See: hooks, Hill, and Korenblat in Conversation 

Joshua Korenblat reminds us that wonder is a renewable source of energy for change, more sustaining than fear, more durable than outrage, and more expansive than compassion alone. His chapter, “Teaching the Wild Within and Around Us,” asks us how we might move students from knowing about the ecological crisis abstractly to knowing it bodily. The deficit bell hooks targets and repairs in her text is stunningly symmetrical to Korenblat’s chapter, where he quotes “species loneliness,” Robin Wall Kimmerer’s term for “a deep, unnamed sadness stemming from estrangement from the rest of Creation, from the loss of relationship” (Kimmerer, 2015, 208). However, Korenblat, Hill, and hooks all resist despair. Instead, they turn toward practice. 

Korenblat’s answer is the nature journal—pictures, words, and numbers; the three languages of a student learning to truly see. hooks’ answer is the garden, the shared meal, the seed pressed into earth by hands that believe the life they are tending is worth tending. These are not so different. Both are acts of what Korenblat, drawing on nature journaling expert John Muir Laws, “calls love: sustained, compassionate attention” to a particular living thing, in a particular place, over time.

hooks is After Interdependence: The Inseparable Relationship Between Ecological Healing and Human Flourishing

hooks is asking what it costs us—physically, spiritually, collectively—when we lose our connection to growing things. She is asking what it means to restore it. 

That question felt present at the Regeneration Symposium on April 10, 2026. The gathering was held at SUNY New Paltz, made possible through a SUNY Innovation Instruction Technology Grant and timed to coincide with the launch of our book Sustainability Learning for Action and Community Engagement, Palgrave/Springer. The symposium brought together educators, farmers, students, and community members around urgent questions of regeneration: ecological, pedagogical, and human. It was the kind of space hooks might have recognized: people choosing to reconnect deliberately. Please refer to the bottom of this page to “Resources,” where you can find Oracle articles about the symposium.

The rice served at lunch on April 10th was grown locally by farmers in Kehonkson, New York. hooks herself mentions rice in her essay: how African settlers in Florida taught rice cultivation to the Seminole people, how food has always been a technology of survival and solidarity, carrying knowledge between communities across generations. To eat that rice at a table full of people gathered around questions of regeneration was to participate in exactly the kind of act hooks describes.

For hooks, food is more than sustenance; it is a relationship to the land, to labor, and to the generations that came before and will follow. The symposium meal extended the essay’s central themes by inviting participants to engage with these ideas in a tangible way. Eating locally grown rice encourages reflection on where food comes from, whose labor makes its cultivation possible, and how regional agricultural practices connect communities to the landscapes they inhabit. As hooks suggests, the acts of growing, preparing, and sharing food are themselves regenerative practices that nurture both ecological and social well-being.

SELF-REFLECTION: AN INVITATION FOR EDUCATORS:

1) Reconnecting with Place

bell hooks argues that our well-being is shaped by our relationship to the earth. 

• What landscapes, gardens, farms, parks, or natural spaces shaped your understanding of place while growing up?
• What is one way you could help students build a stronger relationship with the places they inhabit?
• Where and when do you notice in your students, expressions of care for natural spaces or creatures?

2) Learning Beyond the Classroom Walls

hooks suggests that modern life often distances us from embodied, place-based ways of knowing.

• In what ways does schooling encourage learning through abstraction rather than direct experience?
• What opportunities might exist in your teaching to incorporate observation, movement, outdoor learning, or engagement with local communities?

A Concrete Starting Point: Physicist and educator Fritjof Capra argues that community gardens are among the most powerful tools for teaching sustainability in schools. They are spaces where “even very young children [can] experience nature’s cycles” firsthand: seed to sprout, sprout to harvest, harvest to compost, and back again. 

• Could your school or classroom tend a garden, even a small one? 
• A shared garden requires shared responsibility that helps to build community. For deeper inspiration, explore Capra’s thinking on ecological literacy here: Ecological Literacy: Teaching the Next Generation About Sustainable Development 

3) Valuing Ecological Knowledge

Throughout the essay, hooks highlights Black agrarian traditions and Indigenous knowledge systems that have often been overlooked or marginalized.

• Whose environmental knowledge is represented in your curriculum?
  • Check out the work of Four Arrows on Indigenous worldviews and kinship-based relationships with the Earth. How might Indigenous ways of knowing expand or challenge the environmental perspectives represented in your teaching? 
• Whose perspectives are missing?
• What is one resource, voice, or community partnership you could incorporate to broaden your students’ understanding of ecological knowledge?

4) Engaging the Whole Body in Learning

hooks critiques the separation of mind, body, and earth. 

• How often are students asked to learn through their senses, movement, creativity, or direct experience?
• What is one small change you could make to engage the body as well as the mind in your classroom? 

A Concrete Starting Point: Before starting a lesson on ecology, food systems, or community, take students outside (even briefly). Ask them to sit quietly and notice three things: something growing, something decomposing, and something moving. 

5) Cultivating Collective Well-Being

For hooks, healing is a collective project. 

• What practices in your school help foster connection, care, and belonging?
• What barriers make those relationships more difficult?
• What is one action your classroom or community could take to strengthen collective well-being?

6) Following the Story of a Meal

• Think about a meal whose origins you knew. How did that knowledge affect your experience of eating?
• How might tracing the journey of food—from soil to table—help students better understand relationships among ecology, labor, culture, and community?
• What classroom activity could invite students to investigate the story behind a food they regularly eat?
  • Please check out Emily Houssart’s chapter “The DIRT Project: Empathy, Experimentation, and Belonging.”
    • Houssart invites learners to look beneath the meal itself and consider the living soil that sustains all food systems. Through creative, place-based activities, students explore local land histories, ecological interdependence, and the often-overlooked relationships between humans and the living earth. 
    • As you reflect on the story behind a meal, consider Houssart’s question of how our relationships with land shape our understanding of food. How might creative engagement with soil help students trace the journey of a meal from earth to table and recognize the ecological, cultural, and social relationships that make nourishment possible? 

Wendell Berry, quoted by hooks: "Only by restoring the broken connections can we be healed."