That’s American food, and there’s nothing wrong with it. “Because if it’s soul food, that’s not really soul food. They will say things like, “‘Black folks don’t eat that.’ But we do,” Kelis said. We were thriving because we were able to work the land in such a way that it was feeding our people and for generations.” She sometimes encounters resistance among her family and friends. “The idea of farm-to-table is not a new, trendy thing. “We were proud agriculturists,” Kelis said. The project of the food justice movement, and making fresh, healthy food accessible to Black and brown people everywhere, has become critically important. In cities, Black people often live in food deserts, areas where there are high rates of poverty and few or no grocery stores selling fresh food. Today that number has dwindled to less than 2 percent, or around 45,000 Black farmers, and the majority of those farmers do not own their own land. In 1920, roughly 14 percent of the country’s farms were run by Black people. The move also got Kelis thinking about Black bodies and how we nourish ourselves, how all too often we don’t have access to the foods that would best serve us, and how since the beginning of the slavery era we have been pushed further and further away from who and what we once were. Looking at how I was going to build myself back up, the first thing I started doing was the food, and I was able to get myself back to a place where I felt physically strong again.”
“It wasn’t like when I gave birth to my older son when I was 29.
She has been learning to live differently, and has started to rediscover herself in the process. She had another baby last fall, a daughter who is now eight months old. But, Kelis said, “It ended up being a blessing I was able to be home and learn this land.” The experience has become, she said, a second coming-of-age. It was jarring at first, to go from life on the road to the stillness of the country. None of my friends would’ve pegged me as a farm person, but I’m as farm as it gets at this point. But Kelis-a pop star with six studio albums and a song for the ages in her 2003 hit “Milkshake,” who has performed all over the world and collaborated with some of hip-hop’s and R&B’s biggest artists-actually followed through on her dream. Lots of people, when they want to change their lives, talk about how they’re going to move to the country and live more simply, off the land. “None of my friends would’ve pegged me as a farm person, but I’m as farm as it gets at this point.” “You become farm people quickly,” Kelis told me. Not long after, another sheep went into labor with twins. Kelis had her son get a garbage bag, which she used to craft a makeshift glove, and then gently put her hand where it needed to go as she helped the sheep give birth to a ram. But necessity is, indeed, the mother of invention.
She didn’t-not the kind she’d need for the task at hand. Kelis called her sister, who is a veterinarian.
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Like so many of us, whenever Kelis doesn’t know how to do something, she consults YouTube, whether it’s for guidance on canning the fruits and vegetables she grows on her farm or helping a sheep deliver a lamb, when she realized that the sheep was, in fact, pregnant and in labor. Early one morning in February, Kelis’s 11-year-old son, Knight, walked into the main house on the farm where they live two hours southeast of Los Angeles, and said, “I see a foot hanging out of a sheep’s butt.” Until that moment, Kelis hadn’t even known that the sheep was pregnant.