Joanna Slodownik  

Author, researcher, and founder working at the intersection of food, sustainability, and systemic change

I began my work as an author and educator, I wrote about plant-based nutrition, created practical recipe books, and developed children’s stories that explored our relationship with animals and the living world. My writing was grounded in the belief that meaningful change often starts from the bottom up — with individuals, families, and the stories we tell about what is normal, necessary, or inevitable. Yet even in this early phase, one question kept returning: What kind of relationship with the living world is quietly assumed by the way our food systems function? This question eventually led my work beyond individual choice and into systems.

From everyday food to underlying structures

As I followed the threads behind nutrition advice, sustainability messaging, and public health narratives, it became clear that many outcomes are shaped long before individuals ever make a choice. Food is not only something we consume; it is a system that organizes land, labor, animals, ecosystems, and power. Over time, my focus expanded toward food systems, environmental risk, and the policy-level forces that structure what and how we eat. I became increasingly interested not only in outcomes — health, emissions, biodiversity loss — but in the deeper architectures that produce them: agricultural policy, supply chains, subsidies, institutional language, and the framing of “necessity.”

In these systems, animals and ecosystems often appear only as inputs, resources, or externalities — despite the fact that they form the biological foundation on which human societies depend. Civilization does not stand apart from nature; it stands on it. And when food systems treat living systems as endlessly available, adaptable, or expendable, they quietly undermine the very conditions that support long-term stability.

Writing across scales

I continue to write across multiple formats and audiences — from children’s stories and accessible essays to longer analytical texts aimed at readers interested in policy, systems thinking, and environmental transition. I see this not as fragmentation, but as working across scales: cultural, educational, and institutional. Animals, ecosystems, and human societies are not separate conversations. They are part of the same system — one that can either erode its own foundations or learn to live within them.

My work is an attempt to understand — and make visible — that choice.💚

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Find me on LinkedIn to get in touch.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/joannaslodownik/