Cal State East Bay Professor Inspires Students to Decolonize Their Diets
Professor Luz Calvo cooks tonantzin corn cookies with her ethnic studies class.
- October 16, 2015
Cal State East Bay’s Dr. Luz Calvo has a passion for Mexican food — but not the kind that typically springs to mind. Instead of refried beans and carnitas, she’s focused on using garden fresh produce to create healthy ancestral recipes.
“We have a passion for gardens, for healthy food, for food justice, and for people of color reclaiming our histories,” said Calvo, an associate professor of ethnic studies. “All of this has led us to our current project to reclaim the heritage foods of greater Mexico and Central America as a way of improving the physical, emotional, and spiritual health of U.S. Latinos/as.”
Her new book “Decolonize Your Diet,” co-authored by SFSU Ethnic Studies Professor Catriona Rueda Esquibel, is more than a cookbook. It delves into the history and culture of food in Latin countries and Mexico, and how the average American diet has undermined the health of immigrant populations.
“We believe that these food traditions protect Latino/a immigrants from disease, including diabetes, heart disease, and some cancers,” Calvo said. “Unfortunately, the health of immigrants declines over time. The longer immigrants stay in the U.S. and the more they assimilate into U.S. culture, the worse their health becomes. By the second generation, Latinos/as face the same issues as other poor folks in the U.S., with skyrocketing rates of diabetes and heart disease. Cancer rates also start to increase.”
Calvo and Esquibel, who are life partners, were inspired to write “Decolonize Your Diet” after Calvo was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2006. They both radically changed their diets to one rich in the indigenous plants of the Americas.
“For our Latino/a readers, we hope to reconnect them with their cultural inheritance,” Calvo said. “Our non-Latino/a readers will gain an appreciation for the cultural knowledge held by our recent immigrants to this country, who for the most part, carry this knowledge in the form of recipes and remedies that have been passed down from generation to generation. We find it humbling and awe-inspiring that the corn tortillas and tamales we eat today have been passed down from generation to generation since about 1500 B.C.!”
Since both Calvo and Esquibel teach ethnic studies, they found themselves naturally integrating what they were learning through Calvo’s cancer and their complete lifestyle change into their classrooms. Calvo began teaching a course entitled, “Decolonize Your Diet: Food Justice in Communities of Color” in Fall of 2013.
“Teaching and working on this book over the past several years has produced an interesting ‘back and forth’ process between my students and I,” Calvo said. “I'd find a recipe or cooking technique, which I’d share with them. They'd go home and talk to their parents or grandparents, and come back with their own version of the recipe or something new that I had never heard of. In one of my classes, for example, a student shared her family's recipe for eating yucca flowers. I hadn't even known they were edible.”
Adam Murphy and Luz Marina Cablas, two of Calvo’s students, said since taking her class, their eating habits have improved and they are focused on maintaining a more plant-based diet.
“Luz Calvo taught me to look at food as not only (the) substance you need to eat in order to survive, but as an ancient form of medicine,” Murphy said. “Her class taught me and my classmates to get in touch with our roots and look at food consumption and production in a more critical way.”
“As a Latina descendant, I know the importance of eating fresh food and this course re-enforced my choice in foods and habits,” Cablas said. “When living in El Salvador, I ate beans, rice, fruits, platanos, and corn every day. However, for the past 35 years my daily diet did not have these foods, which after this course, I have incorporated in my diet again.”