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.

Featured Talk Recording

2026 Annual Invitational Lecture at the Cornell Society for the Humanities
“Healing in a Toxic World: Reimagining the Times and Spaces of the Therapeutic”
November 11, 2026

This lecture, drawn from Chapter 5 of Medicines That Feed Us, explores what it means to heal in a toxic world by examining social-therapeutic projects in Tanzania that reimagine the relationship between bodily and ecological healing.

  • Society of the Humanities Lecture — Cornell University
  • Faculty Book Party — March 11, 2026, Cornell University
  • Books in the Stacks talk — details forthcoming
  • Buffalo Street Books / Soil Factory event — details forthcoming
  • 4S author-meets-critics panel — Toronto, October 2026
  • AAA author-meets-critics panel — St. Louis, November 2027

Additional talks, panels, and journal reviews will be added here as they are announced.