Welcome to The Seasonal Body! This is a space dedicated to exploring the intersection of food justice, body image, and disability. Working within an anti-oppressive and intersectional framework, you can expect posts from a range of topics that fit within the realms of feminist food studies, local food advocacy, ecopsychology/nature connection, body positivity, ‘Health at Every Size’/fat acceptance, disability activism, and more.
Full disclosure: much of the content here is based on the personal experiences of me (Julie Nowak). So a bit about me! I am a Toronto-based food justice organizer and educator (however, my current full-time job is focusing on healing after a traumatic brain injury from a bike accident a year ago). Many of my interests also revolve around food: I enjoy growing, cooking and eating food – especially with others in community!
My interest in the intersecting themes of The Seasonal Body comes from my personal experience of finding healing from disordered eating through therapeutic farming and increased access to seasonal food, as well as my current experiences as a disabled person with post-concussion syndrome (PCS).
While I think my experiences as a low-income, disabled woman and eating disorder survivor are of value to share, I am trying to be very mindful about my privilege and the space I take up as a white, educated, thin, cis woman (especially given the lack of other important voices represented in the food justice, body positivity, and disability movements). I hope in the future this website can include other contributing writers; but, for the time being, I will work hard at continually checking my privilege and including anti-oppression analysis. I know I may fail at this and possibly say something problematic; thus, I welcome suggestions on how to improve in this area! (If this is language you are not familiar with, I encourage you to learn more about it. Click here for a good place to start.) Also, I’m working on making the website itself more technologically accessible – something that is taking me a while to learn about (especially with my own computer screen sensitivity issues), so my apologies for the delay on this.
The comment sections are disabled on this website (for my own mental health protection), but you can email me if you’d like to get in touch. Because of my personal low capacity and screen sensitivity, I will probably only post intermittently. To stay in the loop, you can subscribe to receive posts by email, as well as keep an eye on Facebook and Twitter (where you can also share relevant resources with me, which I’d really appreciate!).
This became a much longer first post than intended. So I will end simply by celebrating what The Seasonal Body is about:
Yey bodies! Yey food! Yey seasonality!
The Seasonal Body 