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GUESTS: Catriona Rueda Esquibel, associate professor of Race and Resistance Studies at San Francisco State University. She is the author of With her Machete in her Hand. Her new book, co-authored with Luz Calvo is Decolonize Your Diet: Plant-Based Mexican-American Recipes for Health and Healing

It is a strange fact that immigrants from Latin America suffer fewer diseases of Western culture than their citizen relatives. The longer they remain in the US, the more prone they are to diabetes, cancer, and other diseases. Even learning to speak English correlates with poorer health.

That was part of the basis for a new book by Luz Calvo and Catriona Rueda Esquibel. Decolonize Your Diet is a reintroduction to traditional pre-colonial Mexican foods and methods of food preparation. Calvo is a professor of Ethnic Studies at Cal State East Bay, teaching a course entitled, “Decolonize Your Diet: Food Justice in Communities of Color.” Esquibel is an associate professor in Race and Resistance Studies at San Francisco State University and the author of With her Machete in her Hand. Part historical exploration, and part recipes, their book Decolonize Your Diet, offers a new way of thinking about the food that we eat and how we can be more intimately connected to what we put into our bodies.