Deep resilience: healing through herbal medicine, farming, and ancestral memory
Jovan Sage is a farmer, chef, community organizer, entrepreneur, herbalist, doula, and wellness coach. Drawing on the knowledge of her West African and Indigenous ancestors, she is deeply engaged in healing on many levels–the soil, the body, communities caught up in the global pandemic, race relations–through deeply reciprocal relationships with the land and one another.
Find out more about her work at Alchemist Jovan and Sage’s Larder.
Show Notes:
2’50 Jovan’s path to agriculture and regeneration
4’25 connection between people and soil, reciprocal relationships
6’03 facing history, healing our land and ourselves
7’05 finding shared narratives is key to healing
7’40 defensiveness about racial history
8’44 enslaved Africans provided not just free labor but vast agricultural knowledge
9’07 West Africans were great rice cultivators
9’51 Africans were healers, midwives, cooks and many other contributors to US society
11’40 connecting with slave ancestors and their roles in their communities
13’24 deepening her relationship to food in New York City
18’17 how she found herself in Georgia
18’50 getting the farm through hurricanes in Georgia
23’00 loss of animals, loss of business
27’32 parallels between dealing with hurricanes and pandemics
28’35 positive changes coming from catastrophe
30’24 food system crumbled so quickly, so much food was wasted, distribution system failed
32’09 disrupting the schedules of ranchers and cattle growth cycles
33’50 regeneration and listening
36’24 using ag to heal race relations
More Episodes
Episode 84 – Shifting our food system to benefit farmers and eaters–not corporate monopolies
Joe Maxwell is a farmer and policy leader, and he knows that consumer demand is not enough to make the shift toward a healthy food system. He lays out the problems–and some ways forward.
Episode 83 – From Journalist to Butcher: Camas Davis and the Good Meat Movement
Camas Davis had what she calls an “early onset midlife crisis” when she was around 30–and it led her to study butchering in France. But when she came home she found that the market for good, local meat needed to be cultivated.
Episode 81 – Renewing Native American food traditions
Sanjay Rawal‘s new film, Gather, explores how Native Americans across the U.S. are rediscovering their food traditions–and building on them in the context of present-day realities.