Food Justice As a Path Toward Abolition

FEATURING LEAH PENNIMAN - Farmer and activist Leah Penniman, who runs Soul Fire Farm in upstate New York, calls herself an abolitionist. While food justice, her main focus, may seem unrelated to abolition Penniman sees them as intimately linked.

Leah Penniman is the author of the acclaimed book Farming While Black. In an interview for Sonali Kolhatkar's new book, Talking About Abolition: A Police-Free World is Possible (Seven Stories Press, 2025), Penniman asks us to imagine restoring people’s deep connections to land and growing our own food. She challenges us to ask the question, what if we decarcerated our people and our food simultaneously, relying on the life-giving possi- bilities of land stewardship while rejecting the death-making institutions of policing and imprisonment?

This conversation with Penniman is one of twelve interviews featured in Talking About Abolition.