About Joanna Slodownik

I began my work at the most personal level: food on the plate, families at the table, and the everyday choices shaped by habits, traditions, and values. 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 early work 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.

Animals, nature, and the question of power

Animals have always been central to my work, though not always in the same way. In my children’s book series, This Amazing World, animals are introduced as beings with their own lives, roles, and places within ecosystems — not symbols, not commodities, but participants in a shared world. Those stories were never only about education; they were about relationship.

That same question of relationship later re-emerged at a different scale.

Modern food systems are not only nutritional systems; they are systems of power. They determine whose lives are visible and whose are abstracted, which forms of life are protected and which are optimized, and which harms are considered unavoidable side effects rather than design choices. Animals and ecosystems are frequently positioned as resources to be managed in service of human goals — even as their degradation feeds back into public health risks, climate instability, and ecological collapse.

My work does not frame this as a moral failure of individuals, but as a structural condition: one reinforced by economic incentives, institutional language, and policy frameworks that normalize extraction while calling it efficiency or sustainability.

Language, blind spots, and food as infrastructure

My background in linguistics continues to shape how I analyze these systems. I pay close attention to how language operates in policy and expert discourse — how certain assumptions are embedded, how responsibility is displaced, and how complex ecological relationships are simplified into manageable but misleading categories.

Much of my current work focuses on identifying:

• how animals and ecosystems disappear behind technical terminology

• how “sustainable food” is invoked without clearly defining what is being sustained — and at whose expense

• how demand is treated as fixed, while supply systems quietly shape it

• how environmental damage is reframed as a future problem rather than a present design feature

These are not neutral oversights. They are part of how large systems maintain continuity while appearing to respond to crisis.

At the same time, I am interested in moments where these narratives begin to fracture — where new possibilities for re-routing resources, redefining value, and reducing ecological pressure become visible. This includes emerging conversations around protein, land use, feed systems, and alternative production models — not as technological salvation stories, but as opportunities to realign food systems with ecological reality.

The Green Reset

The Green Reset initiative grew out of this evolution. What began as practical guidance for healthier, plant-rich diets expanded into a broader platform for examining food systems as ecological, political, and cultural infrastructure. Today, Green Reset functions as an umbrella for essays, research concepts, and systemic analysis — connecting nutrition, animals, environment, and policy rather than treating them as separate domains.

The central premise is simple but demanding:
food systems cannot be meaningfully transformed without addressing how power, dependency, and ecological limits are currently organized.

Rather than offering quick fixes, my work within Green Reset focuses on asking better questions — about assumptions, trade-offs, and the futures we are implicitly choosing when we protect certain systems while labeling others unrealistic.

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. 💚