Medicines That Feed Us

Medicines That Feed Us examines the relationship between toxicity and remedy in the face of the intertwined health and environmental crises that are shaping life in the twenty-first century. Through ethnographic work with organizations that use plant-based healing and sustainable farming practices in Tanzania, Stacey A. Langwick asks what it means to heal in a toxic world. Expanding on the Kiswahili phrase dawa lishe, or medicines that feed us, Langwick describes the potency of plant medicines in therapeutic projects that address bodies and environments together. These efforts challenge biomedicine’s intense focus on the internal dynamics of biological bodies and its externalization of the modern agricultural, industrial, and land management practices that impact it. Dawa lishe is not a call to return to the traditional, but an invitation to join contemporary experiments in how we know, use, and govern therapeutic plants. Medicines That Feed Us offers alternative ways of living and dying, growing and decaying, composing and decomposing which acknowledge the interdependence of bodily and ecological health.
Book Launch Events
To celebrate the release of Medicines That Feed Us, several talks and events are being organized over the coming months. This page will be updated as new events, conversations, and reviews appear.
- Society of the Humanities Lecture — Cornell University (details forthcoming)
- Faculty Book Party — March 11, 2026, Cornell University
Additional talks, panels, and journal reviews will be added here as they are announced.