Unplated: An Interview with Missing Witches

On power dynamics, magic, and food as weapon and liberation

This conversation is part of the Unplated series, a collection of interviews with folks whose work intersects with food, but who work outside culinary spheres. My hope is that these conversations not only spark your curiosity, but help you think about how what you eat is connected to the world well beyond your plate.

Missing Witches is a project uncovering lost, and often purposefully buried, voices from the past. As someone whose work shows how few voices we tend to save and share in the world of food, their work resonates with me. How many voices, and stories, and recipes have we lost over the years?  

Amy Torok and Risa Dickens are the Witches, authors and podcasters behind the Missing Witches project.  Living in woods north of Montreal, they go looking through archives of humanity for the historical and contemporary Witches whose voices are missing from our society's dominant discourse. Amy and Risa met backstage at a ukulele showcase, and together they have made music, formed Covens, created a podcast and written a book - Missing Wicthes: Recovering True Histories of Feminist Magic.  Their second book is due out in spring 2023.

Here, I talk with Risa Dickens about the interconnection between food and witchcraft, and how food connects with power, gender, and class in witchcraft history.

JS: First of all, tell me a bit about your work. What are your backgrounds, and how did you come to your interest in witchcraft and history?

RD: Amy and I met for the first time backstage in the greenroom at a ukulele bizarro showcase that was produced by a mutual friend of ours, Krista Muir aka Lederhosen Lucil. Amy sang these roof-shaking songs and I told sad, creepy stories and sang these small voiced threnodies and we cackled like witches together in a tiny, sweaty backroom almost immediately.

Turns out we had both also been organizing these messy, fun interdisciplinary shows in venues all over Montreal for years without crossing paths. And we were both going through, or about to go through, some massive life upheaval when we met. And I think all of that combined to make our friendship a space where strange things could happen. So after a time, we started to invent ritual together alongside playing music and recording videos.

We both have undergraduate degrees in literature and graduate stuff in media and communications, and both have a research bent so when we started to make magic in a spirit of play and of mourning and of gathering with friends, we also started to gather books on witchcraft and we were immediately frustrated by the whitewashing, and the often male-dominated narratives there, and the spiritual bypassing and the commercialism and appropriation from indigenous and other cultures. So we got into digging around more. We launched the Missing Witches podcast with the idea of making a container for the research we were already doing, digging around and telling each other stories about who we found and what ideas we were getting electrified by. And after a time, we had a lot of material and the book emerged from there. Amy likes to joke that we tricked ourselves into writing a book.

JS: In your research, have you noticed any intersections between food and the mythology around witchcraft, or the ways that people were tried during witch trials?

RD: There is so much intersection between food and witchcraft!!  From healers to hexers, Snow White’s Apple to Miracle Max’s life-saving pill, our stories of magic are filled with ingestions!  It’s said that the Salem Witch Trials were officially sparked when Tituba fed a ‘witch cake’ to the family dog.

One piece of this that’s on my mind a lot these days is the way Witches and the female breast start to be depicted in art in the build-up to and during the European Witch Hunts. This is something that Dr. Phyllis Rippey drew our attention to when we spoke, she’s the author of a book called Breastfeeding and the Pursuit of Happiness, an intersectional history of the politics, science, and moralizing that surround breastfeeding. In her chapter on the witch hunts she draws on Silvia Federici’s work in Caliban and the Witch showing how the witch hunts were a tool used to demonize women and break resistance to the Enclosures Act.
The Enclosures Act is like this lynchpin legislation, a legal act of theft, that helps kick off the cascading failure of capitalism. It stripped people of their right to common land, and in doing so cut people off from their ability to grow food and healing plants and to have plant and soil knowledge, and the result was famine. And it was grandmothers who resisted, and so suddenly older women are dangerous. They are poisoning your fields, they are hexing your animals. These women who knew most intimately what was being taken, who had the role of feeding their families or using plants for their communities - or as you pointed out when we spoke, of being important bread-winners as alewives, beer brewers, pointy hat and cat and all - and who didn’t have young children themselves anymore and could mount a resistance, they were the ones to fear and to blame. Dr. Rippey looks at art from the time and sees depictions of the female breast go from being this site of magic and bounty and godliness (which can be problematic in other ways, of course as in the narrow construction of gender roles) into shriveled, creepy; a site of barrenness and famine.

What I think is exciting and important is the power in those marginalized people. The ruling class had to do everything in their power to attack those people because they knew they were absolutely at the heart of community power, even though they sometimes chose to live on the fringes. Similarly here in Canada, I once had the opportunity to interview Dr Evelyne Forget who has been a huge motivation in contemporary conversations about Guaranteed Livable Income, because she really rescued the documentation of one of the first times in the world a basic income experiment was ever attempted. It was in Dauphin Manitoba and it was called Mincome, and it’s an incredible history and is profoundly related to conversations about common land, our common right to a pursuit of happiness. But anyway, one thing she said as an aside has been ringing louder in my ears as I get older and witchier, she said that Canada finally adopted universal health care because elderly women in community kitchens, crafting circles, and church basements took up the cause and agitated their elected officials and made it so.

As we enter our hag years, trust that our power is mounting to make the changes we seek for the sake of our communities, our oddkin and our planet.

JS: I'd like to move away from historical research and into modern-day practice (recognizing, of course, that the two overlap considerably). How do you see food incorporated into witchcraft rituals? Are there ways we're doing this that are new, or are people connecting ritual and food in similar ways to what we've done historically?

RD: So I have to say, 126 episodes into doing the podcast I still feel that we are standing on piles of books and shoulders of wise ones, just peeking through a keyhole. Just doing our best to say what we see from such a limited place in a vast network and not fuck it up too much. Speaking for what witches are doing is as impossible as speaking for anyone else, and maybe more so since the whole thrust of it is skipping doctrine to connect with your own strange flickering life, your perfectly common and completely unique flowering in the local, intimate web of life. But also! This practice is about following paths through contradiction, following the mobius strip, and making magic in the turning point, and so I’ll contradict myself right away, and finally answer your question. (ha!) So, we interviewed Rebecca Beyer, the woman behind the Blood and Spicebush School of Old Craft, and she spoke about “terroir magic.”

And I think the Venn diagram of terroir magic and terroir cuisine is almost a circle in its shared reverence and implied politics. She forages and hunts and draws on Appalachian folk magic and offers free foraging workshops with leaders from the Indigenous community on whose traditional, unceded land she lives and crafts. She is one of so many folks we’ve spoken to who are emphasizing wild tending and kitchen magic to weave intimate bonds with human community and with the more than human world. I think of your own practice of fermentation meditation as being related. Listening, feeding, collaborating, going slow, expanding. Feeding ourselves and the people around us and the land, and in doing so strengthening us and our collective resistance.

Learn more about Missing Witches through their podcast, on Patreon, or on Instagram. We’re doing a collaborative harvest ritual later this year for our Patreon patrons (which I’ll also share with paid newsletter subscribers), so stay tuned!

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