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Radical Queer Bakers
A Zine-Cum-Recipe-Book
Single-minded in our war of attrition, humans have enlisted armies of monocultured clones to march across the land. Genetically refined, chemically protected, and synthetically fed; these plants never rest. Soils crumble as they march; waters slurry with their poison; airs suffocate in their pollution. Mountains have been moved; rivers rerouted; the earth bled black. Their victories, however, are pyrrhic. Gained territories become barren, pillaged of fertility; an agricultural scorched-earth policy. Ransacked of its resources, the land is left battered; at once organically sterile and toxically fertile; conquered with the full human arsenal of chemical and mechanical technology under the unifying flag of monoculture.
Radical Queer Bakers (RQB) is a call to action. It is an endeavour to creatively disseminate conventional treatments of the land; to question and queer traditional agricultural and environmental practices; and better redress how we might cohabit and care for this world.
RQB calls all cooks: let’s spoil this broth. Let’s stir the pot and brew a coup from this soup. Come take the biscuit, and stick your fingers in our half-baked pie. Whether you’re chaff or wheat, let’s make hay while the sun shines. So take a seat at the table, and together let’s have our cake and eat it.
Each issue of RQB will collaborate with a creative who works at the confluence of consumption and queerness. Whether their work focuses on land-management, agriculture, cooking, or eating; we seek those who subvert and divert normativity with their practice. By focussing on kinship and creative collaboration, RQB seeks to explore non-normative forms of reproduction that champion diversity.
Whether queer, questioning, or uncategorised; curious, non-conforming, or unconventional; if you’re an ally who’s aligned: help us stir this pot. So, to all the wallflowers at the field’s edge: let’s cross-pollinate and create!
A note from the editor:
In this beta issue of RQB I explore my own practice, as an example of what this publication might be. As such, these views are my individual consciousness, determined by my queerness, but also by my cisgender, white, middle-class, maleness. I am not practically versed in husbandry; I am a consumer, not a producer, both in theory and praxis. Yet this issue is for all, and endeavours to avoid singularity by encouraging plurality.