This intervention critiques the rationale which underpins the authority of the food system as a context for sustainability, resilience and self-organisation. We apply learning from embodied practice, in particular The Food Journey©, to demonstrate the existence of harm and trauma arising from the overrepresentation of the liberal model of Man as constituting the only reality of humanity. This model has, in reality been a colonial, capitalising force of violent dispossession. It is this context that has produced global circulations of agricultural produce, systematised by a colonialism which violates the integrity of all that it encounters as different. Colonialities of being, power and knowledge extract and exploit globally both people and places as legacies of colonialism and perpetuate an abyssal divide between worlds. We unsettle and reconfigure both geopolitical contemporary and historic accounts of food-related narratives. We do this to help reveal how the ‘food system’ is actually a mainly Euro-American-centred narrative of dispossession, presented as universal. We propose the use of decolonial tools that are pluriversal, ecological and embodied as a means of interrogating the present system design, including its academic and field practice. The embrace of decolonial tools have the potential to take us beyond mere emancipation, cutting through old definitions and understandings of how food sovereignty, farm production, land justice and food itself are understood and applied as concepts. The outcome—as a continuous process of engagement, learning and redefinition—can then lead us towards a relational pluriverse as an expression of freedom and full nourishment for all humans and for the Earth, which is, in itself, a necessary healing.

Practices of acknowledgement are presented as ways of connecting human knowledges of mind and body with readings of essence, affect and ecology in ways that hold potential to actively respond to perceived limitations and barriers to interdependence and healing. Yet the ways in which time and space have been constructed within a European imperial lens has created a conjoined knowledge system which elevates itself above all other ways of knowing. This elitism has taken effect primarily through repeated acts of violence upon bodies, minds and consciousness across the period named the Anthropocene. As a result, there is a need to resort to the wisdom of our somas, through sensing beyond vision and speech to do the work of liberating us from the hold of the partial and limited forms of colonial knowledge systems. We strongly advocate that we call in a new dispensation of being human in which we invite in approaches towards acknowledgement which can open us to processing the pain held within our minds and bodies. By doing so, we feel it will allow access to a pluriverse - a reality of many worlds co-operating within a single planet - of redemptive knowledges. This, we feel will entail acts of reparative justice which have the potential to heal the wounds of a violet and toxic colonial order.  Yet as part of sensing well, in deeply embodied ways, we will also realise that we are all victim to a particularly human, yet also very limited lack of recognition, as a result of ongoing and collective traumas. Such traumas threaten to undermine potentials for admitting the need for reparative healing at the level of both the personal and collective. Sometimes, as we are discovering, breath itself and recollections of connection which embody older knowledges and their deeper meanings, might lead the way towards self and collective reclamation. This, we assert will be a necessary precursor to any movement in the direction of a persistent and reparative justice.  We feel access to this will be realised through profound and meaningful acknowledgements across the worlds which exist beyond the modern idea of a unitary world.

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