Stacey A Langwick

This partnership explores what it means to “eat well” in postcolonial Tanzania. Global health initiatives have increasingly taken up eating habits as a site of intervention. Premised on assumptions that people do not know how to eat well, these efforts often blame those who bear the greatest impact of social and ecological abandonment. In contrast, TRMEGA (Training, Research, Monitoring and Evaluation on Gender and AIDS) reimagines eating well as a response to histories of dispossession and a remedy for the persistent depletion and chronic injury of life in the margins of racial capitalism. For this Tanzanian NGO, eating well is about dwelling in ways that nourish bodies and communities, that strengthen ecologies and economies, and that foster patterns of regeneration. By extending seeds and cuttings from organic gardens of nutrient-dense plants through community groups, their social-ecological projects build on a primary principle of African therapeutics: health and healing emerge in relation to good land relations. The proposed research brings TRMEGA’s work into the heart of a major teaching research hospital in Moshi Tanzania. Together we locate the work of decolonizing medicine in the concrete practices, land-based curricula, and collection policies of gardens dedicated to the healing of bodies and ecologies.