“It Feeds My Soul”: Mutual Aid as a Radical Model for Food Sovereignty

BY ANDREA CHOW

Certain names, identifying details, and organizational affiliations in this article have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals involved. All interviews were originally conducted in Spanish and have been translated into English for clarity and readability.

There’s a saying widely known across Latin America: Panza llena, corazón contento, or “Full stomach, happy heart.” Everyone understands the logic of it. The need for food comes before all else. You skip a meal, your stomach grumbles, your head spins, you bicker with those around you. I do not need to argue that food is necessary, or that it’s a human right, or even that it’s important or good. But I also see hunger everywhere. 

At my job at the Los Angeles Public Defender’s Office, clients come into my office asking for food, and in shame, the best I can do is hand them single-portion packets of trail mix, granola bars, and Welch’s fruit snacks. I see hunger when I walk down the streets of my own neighborhood in Los Angeles, and my neighbors ask me for what I have to spare. I see it most in the abundance of food that grows in California, when I pass through the seemingly infinite acres of farmland, and I know that the workers bent over rows of strawberries are the same ones who are served—and serve—with mutual aid efforts on the weekends.

It is clear to me, not through data collection or surveying, but through living in a community where I bear witness to the suffering of my peers and neighbors, that we exist (and survive) under a system that is designed to deprive us of food, and in doing so, of a community’s ability to coalesce and build up a political consciousness within ourselves. This is not failure, but design. And so, I posit mutual aid, particularly mutual aid food distribution, as not only an alternative to top-down programs seeking to address the dual public health and human rights crises of food insecurity, but as a unique challenge to structural inequalities worthy of investment, study, and participation.

Mutual aid traditionally draws on the principle that relief of the suffering of oppressed peoples also ought to nourish one’s political spirit, not just meet base physical needs. But what does this look like? In my own community, neighbors realized during the COVID-19 pandemic that we were living alongside folks who were going hungry or making tough decisions week to week about whether they should pay for food or for bills. Organizers created the “Free Community Marketplace,” which is carefully distinguished from a traditional food pantry. Throughout the week, participants (including myself) pick up surplus food from farmers markets, grocery stores, and retailers around the area, and on Saturday, we set up an open-air market for folks to walk through and “shop” (for free) for what they want or need. 

Walking around the market is deeply relational. People come to know each other well and build an autonomous, intergenerational community over the span of a few hours on a weekend. At the picnic tables, young children color, read, and work on arts and crafts. Free community health clinics and diaper banks set up tables around the area. Folks share rides, stand guard on street corners to watch for and alert others of ICE presence, and set aside food items for ourselves and our peers that we know they will like. 

One is neither a “volunteer” nor a “recipient,” and there is no income requirement or eligibility needed to receive food from the Free Community Marketplace. In fact, we believe that all people should come to the marketplace: we share food in solidarity with one another, diverting perfectly good food from landfills. Food unfit for human consumption goes to local families who compost or have chickens, horses, or dogs that would eat the scraps. We participate together to destigmatize the idea that receiving free food is shameful—emphasizing, instead, that it is generously given care. 

I pull bags of cauliflower and cabbage for the older Ukrainian lady who I know loves them; containers of mango jicama salad from Trader Joe’s for the stranger whose name I forget but whose face I recognize, remembering how jicama is his favorite; fish for the high school football player who I know is trying to eat more protein; and in return, strangers set aside bags of gluten-free bread because they know that is what I will eat. 

One participant contrasts the Free Community Marketplace to other food pantry models, saying:

For instance, in [other pantries], they give you a bag with soup that Olive Garden donates. And a lot of people just bring it back to the boxes and say, Here, I don’t eat this. But they receive the box, and they don’t have an option of saying, This is not what I need—they just have to take whatever they give them. I feel there’s a lot of time and effort wasted, because if people are receiving things that they’re not using or they’re going to come home and throw away, maybe somebody else could have used it, and they go home with only a small amount instead of getting what they really need. 

Food needs to be more than edible to grant dignity. It needs to meet our soulful needs of desire and cultural appropriateness, and overcome feelings of shame and resentment. We do this by inviting everyone to the table to share food with us and to participate in political mobilization together.

In a humid, dimly-lit kitchen on Los Angeles’ Skid Row, a neighborhood notorious for the encampments lining its streets, mutual aid transforms from an esoteric and opaque political theory into a network of sensory experiences in a small corner kitchen housing LA’s main chapter of Food Not Bombs. Here, mutual aid feels like sweat dripping down your face in a muggy kitchen, with birds chirping from outside an open door. Eyes everywhere water from chopped onions, and the rich, cumin and bay leaf-laden scent of bean stew simmering over a stove fills a sweltering summer crew with excitement for the distribution that will soon follow. 

I sit on an upside-down Home Depot bucket, leaning over a cardboard box of artichokes that will pass through many hands before it finally reaches the stomachs of my neighbors—first through my peers at the Food Not Bombs kitchen, then spooned into a disposable clamshell, and then distributed throughout Skid Row. And I know if I am hungry, I am welcome to pop a cherry tomato (or two) in my mouth. At the end of the night, I toss garbage bags full of verdolaga into the back of my car and feed our leftover food scraps to my chickens at home. Scholars of mutual aid define this practice as a kind of political insurance: in building a village community, we create the debts that nurture us in return when we finally need them.¹ 

Mutual aid doesn’t necessarily need to look like food, however. It has looked like masks, hand sanitizer, and water, and it exists within the broader ecosystem of political action. But beyond material distribution, mutual aid networks “build the new systems and ways of being together that we need.”² We are part of a political and intellectual lineage that dates back to the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast programs, free ambulance programs, and free medical clinics of the 1960s and 1970s.

In this moment of hostile immigration policy in the United States and frozen SNAP and food aid benefits to struggling individuals, mutual aid does not just provide food; it is also “a devalued iteration of radical collective care that provides a transformative alternative to the demobilizing frameworks for understanding social change and expressing dissent that dominate the popular imagination.”³ Unlike government aid, which does not build community networks or give individuals agency to participate in their own liberation or imagine and transform their realities into ones in which their myriad needs are met, horizontal models are solidaristic and “seize space in which new social relations can be enacted.”⁴

This imagination is critical. And it is crafted through the physical process of brute force. When groups of people come together to unfold plastic tables, to strain their backs hoisting boxes of carrots into the backs of trucks, scratching mosquito bites on their legs while distributing food in the buggy late-summer Los Angeles dusk, and to dry out their knuckles as they do the tedious work of washing dishes, space and relations transform. So too does the political meaning of sharing food. 

In taking up highly visible public space in cities without formal approval, “[Food Not Bombs] argues that no one should go hungry given the immense abundance of food and the tremendous amount of resources wasted by militarism.”⁵ As a result of this contentious occupation of space, Food Not Bombs often clashes with political authorities. In 1993-94, a court injunction banned Food Not Bombs from sharing food in public spaces, resulting in over 350 participants getting arrested in San Francisco. 

In the present day, the biggest threat to safe food distribution is the presence of ICE raids. One participant describes an undocumented individual who often attends the food distribution, saying:

She stopped going to [the Free Community Marketplace] for a couple of months until she felt comfortable coming back, and now I give her a ride back home because she doesn’t have anybody to bring her and take her back home. And so it is very interesting—she tells me stuff like, I have my backpack ready behind the door in case one day… I have designated people to watch over my kids in case one day I don’t come back. She’s always like, Can I have one more 8-oz container of milk? Can I have more eggs? And you know that anything extra that she can get is a big deal for her. I know because I am kind of close to her. I know it’s the case for every family that goes in line. We don’t start distributing food until 10 a.m., but they line up at 6:30. That thing alone tells you that it’s not because they have nothing else to do with their Saturday, but because they need desperately what they get there.

And given that those without legal status cannot receive government benefits for food aid, what other aid is there that doesn’t require income verification, ID, proof of residency—except mutual aid?

Lately, the intersection of immigration policy and food policy has been at the forefront of mutual aid organizations’ minds. Another Food Not Bombs chapter, called Comida No Bombas, serves Southeast Los Angeles in a predominantly Mexican neighborhood. Their security has been extremely tight for fear of raids and even internal infiltrators. To join the group right now, one must have a personal connection to somebody who already cooks with them in order to gain access to information about their meeting location. Individuals wanting to join must send photos of themselves and insist, over encrypted messaging platforms, that they are not, in fact, right-wing ICE informants. 

At other groups, participants stand on street corners wearing identifiable clothing to mark themselves as community patrols, eyeing the boulevard on the lookout for dark-tinted vans that could belong to ICE. When raids first ramped up in Los Angeles in early June 2025, several months went by with few people showing up for food. One organization mobilized quickly to combat the anxiety and fear due to ICE raids by recruiting community members to drop off boxes of food at people’s front doors. Today, the Free Community Marketplace serves more than twice as many individuals as it did at its inception, during the height of the pandemic. And while the community it has grown into is beautiful, we continue to dream of a world in which our work is no longer necessary.

In California, however, there is an obvious paradox. California grows about one-third of the nation’s produce,⁶ and an estimated 50% of California’s agricultural workers are undocumented.⁷ Many migrants come from regions in Mexico and Central America where milpa-style farming is a way of life—agriculture as a tradition of care for land and natural resources, billowing smoke into wide skies that have been tended over generations; chiles, corn, beans, and squash cultivated on timescales longer than memory.⁸

Global North policy, particularly NAFTA, subsidizes American goods at the expense of Mexican livelihoods and forces the hands of economic migrants to cross borders north in search of dignified work. Industrial agriculture becomes the labor that is familiar.⁹ These hands are paid, in Ventura County, on average, around $22,000 per year.¹⁰ It does not take an economist to figure out that in one of the wealthiest counties in the nation—the county that is home to the Malibu Barbie mansion and Calabasas celebrity ranches—this income is absolutely not enough to live on. This presents us with a wild, unimaginable, and trans-border problem of wealth inequality, and the question—how is it that the individuals who grow food for a living cannot afford to feed themselves?

One cannot begin to answer this. But instead, mutual aid projects, especially in California’s agricultural regions that largely serve migrants, illuminate a simple fact: labor, poverty, migration, and human rights violations in agriculture are all inextricable from one another. And they converge in a simple material reality, one in which, without the care of neighbors for one another and repudiation of institutional permission, food-insecure migrants would starve. Thus, mutual aid is not just a hyperlocal political project, nor is it a simple model for charity stuffing the gaps when government fails. It is a transformative infrastructure for public health and food sovereignty that actively contributes to a vision of a world where no one is precluded from their own dignity for lack of food. 

When asked to reflect on her time participating in the Free Community Marketplace, one individual doesn’t hesitate: 

When I first joined, I felt a little intimidated. I kept wondering whether I belonged here, whether I was out of my league. I thought, What am I doing here? Maybe they just invited me out of courtesy, maybe they didn’t really want me here. But slowly, I started to notice that they were giving me the freedom to do what I felt comfortable doing. They let me talk to people. And before I knew it, I felt more at ease, walking around, asking who needed a cart for their things, finding cardboard boxes, making sure everyone could balance their groceries on the hand truck. Guiding people, talking to them in my own language. The organizers saw that in me, and it made me feel… I don’t want to say important, because I know they could manage without me — I truly believe nobody is indispensable — but it made me feel comfortable, and genuinely happy to be there. It’s fulfilling. It feeds my soul.

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