As I walked through the tangled streets of Palermo in Sicily during my fieldwork in 2018, I came across a piece of street art that stopped me in my tracks. A black man dressed in a bright white tunic was depicted falling over - knocked forward by a floating rifle, aimed squarely at his back. Tomatoes sailed to the right, and beneath the rifle, in letters as white as the man’s tunic, read: “Killing Tomatoes”. Issues of social inequality and agricultural systems were rendered perfectly to me in the piece.

And, at that moment, I knew I wanted my academic and professional work to address issues of inequality. As an anthropologist, I take a community-based approach to investigate social and environmental disparities, and I have found that stories are key to engaging with a larger audience about inequality.

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