The Biotic Woman

Recently, I was writing with a former-chef friend about her own organic crop cultivation. When comparing her own organic heirloom varieties to the pathetically pale tomatoes for sale in her Canadian market, she said the following: "Tomato production is a truly shocking field. Have you ever been to southern Spain? Huge strips of land under black tarps to quick-grow tomatoes that taste like water are sprayed with pesticides and leave behind nothing but wasteland when the tarp is removed and the plants die off, and all heavily subsidized by the EU. Ugh."

Ida Hammer has been writing The Vegan Ideal for several years as a way to examine and deconstruct overlapping oppressions. Her work centers on undoing transphobia in vegetarian and ecofeminist communities. Ida was kind of enough to speak with me recently about how cissexual privilege undermines a lot of ecofeminist writing and how she has carved safe space for herself in a sometimes very anti-trans movement.