Following the publishing of her book chapter in “Nurturing Food Justice: Expansive and Intersectional Visions,” by Alison Hope Alkon and Julian Agyeman, Chellamal Keshavan spoke to me about her background in food justice, specifically first foods.
Prior to starting the Interdisciplinary Doctorate program in Biological Anthropology at Tufts University, she spent time in the perinatal advocacy spaces primarily mobilizing data around the health outcomes of Black and Brown mothers and infants. This influenced her interest in first foods equity, particularly from her work as a doula.
She earned a spot as a member of the Neighborhood Fellows cohort in 2023 where she was surprised to learn that our first feeding experiences were absent from larger Food Justice narratives. Having infant and toddler feeding pedagogies and being a mother herself, she was surprised to find that Food Justice had yet to incorporate what she then coined “our very first food experiences.” Working closely with Professor Julian Agyeman in his Food Justice course, she was able to explore ways to contribute to the existing narrative.
“To Julian’s credit, he almost immediately invited me to think together around ways to fold my perspective on our first feeding experiences into larger Food Justice narratives.”
Chellamal Keshavan
Her message is that the project of Food Justice is malleable and generative; that it has the potential to grow and evolve with new inputs. According to Chellamal, breastfeeding equity is a concept born out of grassroots community based maternal health work, so in seeking to understand First Food Equity as a reparative framework, she encourages academia to grapple with narratives frequently instantiated in perinatal community-based settings.
Her chapter in the book asks the broader Food Justice umbrella to inculcate First Food Equity into its scope; to situate Food Justice as a lifespan conversation beginning with breastfeeding and ‘fed is best’ practices. The chapter goes on to examine complex issues of social reproduction, value use, and racial capitalism within the context of breastfeeding. The chapter also explores the benefits and offers constitutive thoughts on opportunities whereby Food Justice and First Food Equity can partner in the equitable support of parents and young children.
Chellamal’s current research examines biologies of exchange; the political economies of transnational adoption through feminist and critical public health frameworks, with a focus on adoption between India and the United States. She uses ethnographic, qualitative, and mixed methods approaches to develop the concept of bioethnic conscription to analyze how adoptive bodies are enrolled into biomedical, humanitarian, and genetic logics under the guise of care.
The complete book, inclusive of Chellamal’s chapter, can be accessed at this link.
Explore Chellamal’s latest work here.