For the Culture: Issue 01 - It's Personal + The Pandemic

Dr. Jessica B. Harris A magazine celebrating Black women and femmes in food and wine

ISSUE 01

IT’S PERSONAL + THE PANDEMIC

for the culture — ISSUE 01 Editor in Chief Klancy Miller @klancycooks @fortheculturefoodmag Art Director Carolyn Seng @carolynseng carolynseng.com

Sara K. Berhanu @sarakberhanu Dana Gray @101blessings @mendocino_treehouse Akudo Mez @akudoamazing

Contributors (IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE) Kelly Marshall @sans.murs @birthingofanation kellymarshallphoto.com

Vonnie Williams @sincerelyvonnie

Searit Huluf @sorryshoots

Zoe Adjonyoh @zoeadjonyoh

Cha McCoy @cha_squared

Mashama Bailey @mashamabailey

Kyla Marshell @khellonmars kylamarshell.com

Thérèse Nelson @blackculinary

Simone Martin-Newberry heysimone.com Alisha Sommer @alisha_sommer

Erica N. Cardwell @erica.cardwell

Monica O’Connell @curtisandcake Adjoa Kittoe @seulful

Omolola Olateju @blackgirlsdrink

Carmen Harris @carmendharris @magnusonwater

Amethyst Ganaway @thizzg

Yewande Komolafe @yewande_komolafe

Fabienne Toback @savyfaby

Amanda Yee @paramette.ic

Karis Jagger @heysistah heysistah.com

Tonya Abari @iamtabari

Leslie Gamboni @lesliegamboni Zella Palmer @maisonzella Antonia Brown antoniabrown.jimdofree.com Martine Thompson @pattiesncreamsoda martinethompson.com Makshya Tolbert @processdaily Jacqueline Greaves @jacquiesfoodfortalk

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Thank You Layla Schlack Davis Thompson-Moss

Kia Damon @kiacooks Mary Fawzy @purple_turnips Nicole Jenkins @nije05 thisisthegroundwork.com Hawa Hassan @hawahassan Kyisha Davenport @barnoirboston @tanamofficial

Copyright 2021 For the Culture Magazine LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this magazine may be reproduced in any form for any purpose without written permission from the publisher.

INQUIRIES fortheculturemagazineny@gmail.com ONLINE fortheculturefoodmag.com instagram.com/fortheculturefoodmag ON THE COVER Dr. Jessica B. Harris: Kelly Marshall Blacker the Berry: Dana Gray PRINTED BY Hemlock Printers www.hemlock.com

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

PHOTO BY KELLY MARSHALL

Just over a year ago, I launched an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign to create the first issue of For the Culture: A Magazine Celebrating Black Women and Femmes in Food and Wine. I did this because Black women have shaped cuisine in the U.S. and in many countries throughout the world and our stories about our expertise and relationships to food do not get enough attention. The goal was to create a publication that centers our experiences.

More than 679 people gave to the crowdfunder and helped raise $38,168. Dozens more sent money

by Venmo, PayPal and CashApp. There was even a massive bake sale organized by Jenelle Kellam and Keia Mastrianni that brought in the largest contribution. Many friends vociferously amplified this project in all forms of media. This magazine is truly a group effort and I’m grateful for your support.

Initially, the theme of the first issue was going to be “It’s Personal,” because not being seen feels personal. To be seen is personal. One’s relationship to food, drinks, and hospitality and food media is personal. We put out a call for submissions and within weeks the pandemic began. A month later, it was clear that Black and Brown people were being disproportionately affected by the novel coronavirus. It was also clear that the world of hospitality and the people who work in it would suffer enormously. So, the first issue has a double theme—It’s Personal and the pandemic.

You’ll see many personal essays. I think that format is one of the most powerful ways for people to share their voices. You will also notice that the first issue is divided into “Before,” “During,” and “After,” to reflect a sense of time (what is time?)—what we did before the pandemic, our activities at the height of the first wave, the uprisings, and our visions for what we can create in the future.

It’s a pure thrill that Dr. Jessica B. Harris, one of the most impactful and prolific culinarians of our time, agreed to be the inaugural cover star. It’s also an honor to publish the work of 35 extraordinarily talented women throughout the diaspora who contributed to the first issue. I hope you will enjoy the deeply personal stories that take us to a family reunion in Ethiopia, back in time in New Orleans, through grieving rituals, to a cocktail hour on Martha’s Vineyard, to Brooklyn and Rome, with several stops for reflection and many juicy conversations in between.

Thank you for your support and for reading For the Culture!

In Solidarity, Klancy

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for the culture — ISSUE 01

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CONTENTS

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CONTENTS

for the culture — ISSUE 01

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Voyages, dreams, and meals from the before times…

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Cooking in the Motherland WORDS AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY SEARIT HULUF

Doro Wot and Dulet with a side of sour cream

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BEFORE

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t was the first day of 2020 when we landed in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia at around 2 a.m. My friends, Tiajha and Kevin, and I were exhausted from our 13-hour flight from Santorini, which included a layover in Istanbul. I could tell that my mom, Hirut Haleff, was exhausted when she saw me, but was happy that we landed safely.

My cousin, Sami, and I finally met each other for the first time, and he gave me a warm embrace. We loaded our luggage into the cab and drove through the dirt streets and saw herds of sheep sound asleep. I looked up from the taxi window and watched the stars as we headed to our motel. Finally, I made it to the Motherland.

Ethiopia is one of the oldest countries in the world, with more than 80 languages spoken from about 10 different tribes. We stayed in Addis for a couple of days to attend dance dinners and drink Tej - Ethiopian honey wine. The dinners included a buffet-style meal while listening to music and watching dances from different tribes in Ethiopia. Hirut, Tiajha, and I even got on stage to dance to traditional Tigrinya music. This was my fondest memory of the trip because it reflected two of my worlds morphing into one, something I would never think could happen.

My parents left Ethiopia in the 1980s due to the Civil War brought up by the Communist party, The Derg. Being born Asmera stirring the sticky in the U.S., I had a hard time dough. connecting to my culture. My mother worked a lot of hours and wasn’t home as much. I spent a lot of time feeling that I wasn’t Black enough and wanting to be more American.

It wasn’t until after graduating from college in 2015 that I was craving to learn more about Ethiopia and it wasn’t until I was in my late 20s that I wanted to meet my extended family.

We landed in Mekelle a couple of days before Christmas (Ethiopia follows the Gregorian Calendar), where the majority of my Trigrinya family lives.

My uncle, Asfawesen, greeted us with open arms and an electric laugh. He is a Teacher’s Assistant at Mekelle University in the Computer Science department. Filled with high energy, Asfawesen took on the role as our tour guide and answered every single question we had in full detail during our car ride to our motel. We immediately dropped our bags in our rooms and walked to the family house.

Hirut bought the house in Mekelle in the early 2000s while working a minimum wage job in the U.S. She worked long hours and multiple nurse assistant jobs so they could have a roof over their heads. The moment we entered the house, a goat, tied up next to a tree, surrounded by its poop, grabbed our attention. Hirut told me that one of the farmers in our family gifted us with a goat as a welcome gift. “This is our

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My Dad and Hirut with my older half sister Hiwot.

Christmas dinner,” Asfawesen said as he petted the goat. The house cat came by our feet, looked up at us, and then quickly left in disinterest.

The house included a driveway, a small studio in the back, three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a kitchen area. They have a medium-size TV screen in the living room where they watch American films and the news. There isn’t a stove or fridge in the house. All the cooking is done outside in the driveway. My aunts did all the cooking, and it was impressive to see them whip up three meals for six people every day.

“Searit!” screamed my aunt, Asmera.

Tight embraces with three to four kisses on my cheeks, an Ethiopian greeting when you haven’t seen someone for so long or met for the first time. One by one, I finally met, hugged, and kissed each family member, which consisted of my cousins, Miki, Fstum, and Germanesh. They spoke in rapid-

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My sister, Sarah, and I.

fire Tigrinya and stared at me in a long gaze while smiling. They would ask me questions, and thankfully Asfawesen and a couple of my cousins translated for me. I don’t know how to speak Tigrinya, and only half of my family understands English, so we mainly communicated through food.

But first, buna! I am an avid coffee drinker and tend to drink it like water.

Not a lot of people know this, but coffee was discovered in Ethiopia. The story behind it is that a goat herder named Kaldi noticed that whenever his goats ate cherries from a particular tree, they would have a surge of energy that would keep them up all night. This discovery eventually led to buna, which translates to coffee, but is also the ceremony of coffee making from scratch.

Learning how to roast and brew coffee from scratch every day from Germanesh was a blessing. She started a flame, pulled a large bag of green beans from

behind her stool, and grabbed a handful of them to put on a pan. She would hand fan the flame while stirring the pan, making sure each bean was evenly roasted.

Once the beans morph into a dark mocha color, it’s ready to be ground.

Traditionally, you would go around the room and have people smell the roasted beans before transferring it to a mortar.

We smashed and ground the beans for a good 15 to 20 minutes or until it was a fluffy, powder-like texture with a wooden stick. The Jebena, the vessel used to brew the coffee, was filled with water to boil while we smashed the beans.

We placed the fresh grounds in a cup, added some of the hot water from the Jebena, swirled it around the cup, and poured it back in. The Jebena was then placed back on the flame, brewing the grounds and water into one. I added sugar into the finjal, small cups used

BEFORE

Hirut cutting the fat out and mincing it to make Dulet.

to serve the coffee. I slowly poured in the coffee, making sure not to go too fast so that the grinds would not pour out. Traditionally, you get three cups of coffee for each service, usually after a meal.

On Christmas Eve, we started to prepare the Doro Wot, which is a classic Ethiopian stew meat dish that uses the popular spice called berbere.

It’s a labor-intensive process and takes several hours to cook. Asmera and Hirut finely chopped onions when suddenly, the power went out. Asfawesen explained that the neighborhood had new power lines added to help with the constant power outages, but it has gotten worse. The power outage didn’t stop them from cooking. Hirut held a flashlight as the onions were caramelizing in the oil and berbere.

The next day there still wasn’t any power. Luckily, we had the sun.

Asfawesen was talking to a man with a

Asmera holding on to intestines that the butcher passed to her.

large knife when we entered the home.

“Merry Christmas! Are you ready?” he said in excitement. It took us a minute to realize that he wasn’t joking about the goat being Christmas dinner, and the man standing next to him was the local butcher. Earlier in the morning, they killed the chickens and cleaned them for the Doro Wot, but Asfawesen believed it was essential to watch the process of preparing the goat from beginning to end. The butcher was fast and swift. He quickly sliced the goat into pieces and passed the liver, intestines, and other organs to Asmera and Hirut to clean and prepare to make Dulet -- minced goat with berbere, butter, and veggies sautéed together in a pot.

My friends and I were on fan duty.

There needed to be a consistent amount of heat to cook the Doro wot, specifically, to cook the chicken.

The eldest ate first while the youngest (Miki) went around the room, holding

a water bucket and soap so everyone could wash their hands before they ate. There is another traditional gesture called Gursha, which means mouthful.

You take a handful of food and feed it to someone else at the table. This is a sign of respect and honoring the person in the room. It took a while for my friends and me to get used to someone feeding us, but we felt the love.

After Christmas, the power finally came back. My friends, Tiajha and Kevin left for the States, and I continued to get closer to my family members while cooking. I asked Miki if he could cook me something, and he said that he doesn’t cook, only women do. I challenged him on that statement and asked him and Fstum help prepare lunch.

First, we made Shiro - a chickpea-based curry. We started the fire and charred a tomato that we then minced and mixed with red onion.

Then, Germanesh added berbere,

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BEFORE

Left: Germanesh fans the fire while Tiajha roasts coffee beans Above: Tomato mixed in with onion Right: Kneading of dough

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From left to right: Kevin Lin, Tiajha Nakahara, Fstum, Asfawesen, me, House Cat, Great Uncle, Germanesh, Hirut Haleff, Asmera, Sami, Miki

salt, cardamom, chickpea powder, and water. We slowly mixed all the ingredients until it turned to a bright orange color.

Next, we made Atkilt - cabbage stir fry dish that slowly softens the cabbage, carrots, and potato with salt and oil.

These dishes were quick and used minimal ingredients. We made jokes about how we can all be the perfect housewife/househusband if we just cooked these two dishes.

Later that evening, I asked Germanesh if she could teach me how to make Himbasha. She added flour, yeast, and water to a bowl. She kneaded it for a good 10 to 15 minutes and then let it rest. Germanesh knew little English, so it was fun trying to figure out what we were saying to each other. I also picked up some Tigrinya words and phrases, thanks to her.

After resting for about an hour, we

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gently pushed it to form a circle. With a knife, we lightly marked lines on top of it. I slid it on a stove, put a lid on it, and cooked it for 20 minutes before flipping it on the other side.

On the last day in Mekelle, Asmera made me my favorite breakfast, Ga’at.

It’s sticky dough cooked on an open flame and in the middle of it is melted butter mixed in with berbere and salt -a perfect goodbye meal.

We rented a van, so everyone could come say goodbye to my mom and I at the airport. They packed us Himbasha, which was helpful because we ended up eating it when our flight got delayed for several hours. Of course, I had to drink coffee with it, and there was a beautiful traditional coffee station to order from as we waited for our plane. It was a bittersweet ending of our trip and we all agreed to return in 2021 for another family reunion. But unfortunately, our

second reunion might take a while.

On November 4th, 2020, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed sent military troops to Mekelle. The government shut down power, Internet, banks, and call services.

Even humanitarian aids are having a hard time sending medical supplies and food to the country. We haven’t had any contact with my extended family for the past couple of weeks, and are not sure if they fled to a neighboring country or stayed in Mekelle.

It’s hard for me to stay positive with the insane amount of events that happened this year and it’s even harder to think it might end with Ethiopia going into another civil war. To help balance my stress and constant worrying, I make buna fresh every morning, just like how I was taught to make it in Mekelle. I close my eyes for my first sip and it takes me back to Christmas day, together with my family.

It’s Beyond Wine,

THIS IS BUSINESS Krista Scruggs is the founder of ZAFA Wines, located in Isle La Motte Vermont. For the first issue of For the Culture, Cha McCoy spoke with Scruggs about her journey to becoming a winemaker.

WORDS BY CHA MCCOY PHOTOGRAPHY BY NICHOLAS GENTILE

Cha McCoy: Let’s start from the beginning—what was the impact of growing up in California and how does having a legacy of Black farmers connect you to wine?

Krista Scruggs: When the opportunity presented itself to work for Constellation Brands [an American producer and marketer of wine, beer and spirits], I was not about to make the connection between spending time with my grandfather on his homestead. It didn’t hit until I went to visit my maternal grandmother, who practically raised me, last year that the house I grew up in was across the street from one of E.J. Gallo’s tank farms. The irony of it—that this was across the street the whole time does not mean that it’s ours or mine.

I did not feel like there was any connection. My family didn’t own that land, no one in my family worked in wine. So, it was really strange— it’s something I am still processing honestly. When I got the opportunity, it was more from a perspective of, Constellation Brands just acquired Robert Mondavi. And I knew Robert Mondavi, because that’s the bottle of wine my mom had on the table. By no means, did my family come from money.

My parents had me really young, part of my life was spent on welfare. My parents grew up and socio-economically, things changed but food was the one constant. I always had comfort meals going to my grandpa’s house, which I resented as kid, where I had to pick weeds every Saturday and Sunday every summer. Eating out was not even a thing. We always ate what was grown there and even at my maternal grandparents’ they grew vegetables and still do to this day.

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BEFORE CM: What pivotal moment made you believe that you too could be a winemaker?

KS: Remember you are also talking to someone who thought they would be the first woman in the NBA before the WNBA. I remember when I was a kid, at four-years old and watching my uncle and watching him play basketball and asking him, ‘I want you to teach me how to do that’ and he did and I practiced and then I had an injury that changed my trajectory. I truly thought I was going to be the first woman in the NBA. I am so blessed to grow up in an environment, having aunts, uncles, grandmothers, and a mother who said that if I really wanted to do something, I could do whatever I want.

I know that my aunts and uncles did not have that type of support, my grandmother and mom’s upbringing was different than mine. And they wanted it to look different for me. Makes me want to cry, but this is why I knew working at Constellation Brands I could quit my job.

And I still supplemented my income by doing web design, even up to 2018. So when I went to France and Italy [to apprentice at vineyards], I just needed a place to sleep—feed me, and give me internet access and I will give you all of me if you just teach me everything I want to learn from you. And they did. I would work throughout the day because of the time difference, I worked throughout the day, I worked on a web design project, and that is how I was able to fly around.

I did what I had to do. When you have nothing to lose, you believe you have everything to gain. My mom would say, ‘you said you want to be this, I am going to hold you accountable for that, my job is to help you accomplish what you said you are going to do.’

CM: I know you worked with Deirdre Heeken of La Garagista Farm and Winery,

but what made you believe in and stay in Vermont? Did you ever consider Vermont or even Texas when you first made the decision to become a winemaker?

KS: When I made a decision to leave Constellation Brands to pursue becoming a grower and a winemaker I felt like I could not accomplish that at Constellation Brands. Realizing that every place I did a little stage in—Washington to Italy and France, all these people I was working for, this is passed down land for families that have been doing this for generations.

If I went back to California, the only way I could do this was on my grandfather’s property. When I got back, he died two months after I returned from France. I could never be a grower and producer in

KS: Exactly, [in California], there is a financial barrier. For me pursuing regions that I thought had that opportunity no matter how long it took. I never thought that California was a realistic opportunity.

The journey [to ownership] would have been exponentially longer if not impossible. At that point in time, no matter who I worked for, and the subsequent person I worked for after it was with contingencies, I will be your assistant wine maker, but I will start my own and pursue my own land. I made that very clear.

When the opportunity presented itself for me to work with Deirdre [at Garagista].

We thought it would be five years, from that moment that was 2016, and we are now at 2020, and I am a couple of weeks out from closing on my own 50 acres, which I have been working for the last year and a half.

CM: Where did you think of originally going and how has this changed your outlook on defining terroir?

California. That’s when I set my sights on anywhere else but California. Even if I had that small parcel, I did not see California as a place that I could afford to have land or have access to it.

CM: You still are living out his legacy.

KS: Yes, I am very intentional and the act of what my work is is all that matters. I am going to get my own land. By any means necessary I was going to be a grower and a producer. A lot people say ‘she left California for Vermont,’ but it’s beyond wine. It’s about wine and ownership. I can make wine anywhere, but to have access to land and the opportunity to do so is not necessarily anywhere.

CM: Especially at that price point.

KS: Texas nor Vermont crossed my mind but they were opportunities.

I think that one of the best things for me was not limiting myself to what something should look like. I didn’t have a place in mind. It was not about a place it was about my goal, my vision, what I had in mind. The vision could have been executed anywhere—when I put that intention out there. Deirdre had a pouring in Oakland at Ordinaire. And I just happened to be in town that day. A lot of people say ‘it’s so white in Vermont’ but honestly my day-to-day here and the microaggressions here, I dealt with in California too. I am on a mission; those things are petty to me, in the context of what I’m about to do and honoring my legacy and my grandfather and creating a legacy for myself as a Black farmer and grower. It didn’t matter where it was. One of my favorite quotes is ‘there is nothing harder than to be given a chance.’ I was

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BEFORE just looking for a chance to come from somewhere to implement my vision.

Vermont is 27 years old as a growing region, every producer here is still learning what the terroir is and what that means.

That’s the exciting part, we are creating that [definition of] terroir right now.

Working with apples and grapes is our terroir because that grows side-by-side here. Everything I am doing is traditional as a farmer. I am not doing anything different, the only thing that is unique is me, and no one can replicate that perspective on how I do it and what I do. And I am not trying to fit into a box at all. And because I am Black, I don’t feel restricted in some of those homogenous ways that some of my counter parts do when they are producing and how they need to be. I am just going to be me.

CM: Five to ten years from now, what is the future of ZAFA Wines and what new verticals or industries do you hope to establish?

KS: Ten years is my halfway point. I am retiring in 20 years; I put that out into the universe. All the vines that I am putting in the ground in a couple of weeks—five years from now will be first harvest. First ZAFA wines on my own land. I lease land right now, so it’s still share cropping, but there I will be free. Owning land allows me to be freely me. And through that, it’s really important that ZAFA will exist beyond me. If you know what it stands for, it’s a counter spell against colonization.

What I am building there and what I want to build 10 years from now, I am creating an opportunity and a space for other Black people in this industry, from Somms to producers.

CM: You are creating a safe space for us to produce, learn, to commune and basically be happy without the ‘Karens’ interrupting our Black joy. Sounds like in 10 years this will be a retreat and resource.

KS: And to learn from each other. I won’t be able to go out even after the pandemic, I won’t be able to go out to Champagne.

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I am also hoping that you guys will be coming to me in that way so I can learn from you guys as well. My job now is to maintain that land and to grow it.

CM: Winemaking is labor-intensive work. What would you like to share with women of color who are at the beginning of their wine entrepreneurial journeys to becoming future owners of wineries and wine brands?

KS: I am having a hard time answering this question. I am still going through it and still learning. Not everyone has had resources like I had. What I want them to know is that, I am 36 and 10 years ago, when I pursued this career I had no clue on how to get to where I am at right now and I didn’t even know who to ask. I had my passion and my vision. I didn’t have a dollar to my name. I am happy that I am a Black woman because it prepared me for this journey in a way that only a Black woman in America can understand.

Because this ain’t for the faint of heart, but we are resilient. If I can tell anyone anything, it would be, it’s never going to ever look like what you thought it was going to be and it’s never going to take the time, either shorter or longer, that you thought it was going to. Regardless, there

is going to be a way that you will be given an opportunity, and like I said in the beginning it’s hard to be given a chance.

And when that change is presented to you and it doesn’t look like how you thought, you should still take it because it just means you are on that right path and that’s how I ended up in Vermont and how I ended up in Texas. I didn’t lock myself up into what it should look like. I had a vision, I wanted to be a land owner and winemaker. I truly believe every one’s dreams can come true as long as they remove the boundary of what it is tied to and what it should look like. I didn’t pursue this to be a business owner, I just wanted to be a farmer/winemaker. It didn’t look like this. Now with the two businesses ZAFA and CO Cellars, I never thought I would be making can wines. It was an opportunity for me to turn into a business owner. Not going to work with your dream producer? Sometimes there is a good reason for that too. Stay open always.

Don’t be scared to leap with your eyes open. And I truly believe you will fall into whatever it is you are supposed to do. But if you are leading with fear or these ideas of what something should be it’s not going to happen for you.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity and length.

Family Foodways WORDS BY KYLA MARSHELL Peaches from a can. Ice cream softened in the microwave.

Waffles eked out of an industrial-sized iron. Spaghetti with his mysterious, magical sauce. These are just a few of the things I can remember my grandfather fixing me to eat, as a child and an adult. Making me food, as a baby, when I visited during summer vacation, and as an adult, was one of the many ways he cared for me, his only grandchild. That he was the family chef was just one way that he and my grandmother occupied reverse gender roles: she loves sports, he didn’t; she has a man’s name, he a woman’s.

He loved to cook. She still does not.

It seems my grandmother knew a few things about herself growing up, and that she hated cooking was one of them. Her options in life were somewhat limited—she was a poor, Black, country girl in Virginia, a mother at only 18. But she had the opportunity to go to college briefly, and choose from two tracks: cooking or sewing. She gleefully chose the latter.

My mother inherited my grandmother’s feelings and relationship to cooking: she only started once I was born and she could no longer avoid it, a full 30 years. When she did, she did an okay job: fried or grilled chicken with a side of barbecue sauce; Swedish meatballs if we had company; her own version of Granddaddy’s spaghetti, whose ingredients list was long and improvised, and literally imitated but not duplicated.

Once I was a teenager and more self-sufficient, my mother turned me over to Domino’s, Lean Cuisine, and the new Thai spot that opened up the street. Her aversion was not just to cooking, but to food itself, generally liking only one item in any food group, nothing weirdly textured, piquant, or “all mixed together.” When I would go home for the holidays, I’d open the refrigerator to find it filled with condiments, milk, light and air.

I assumed I would be the third generation of non-cooking women, so averse was I to other domestic tasks. But once I moved to New York at age 22, I started immediately. There was no way around it, I figured. How else could I afford to eat on my meager salary of whatever-I-did-for-money-then? Eventually I saw that many people did avoid cooking, my roommate being one of them, by buying frozen meals and take-out. But by then I’d gotten into the habit: spending $12 on onions, garlic, bell peppers, and tomatoes and making my own version of The Sauce; or a stew full up with black beans, sweet potatoes, apples, and kale.

I taught myself how to make French toast, mac ‘n’ cheese, and fried chicken; a family friend bought me a Bundt pan and hand mixer—I called it my “wifey kit”—and showed me how to bake.

Having grown up without anyone who insisted I help while they cooked, I had to learn to cook in the public square: All Recipes. I learned to bring stews to a boil then reduce to a simmer; to sauté onions with salt before adding garlic and ginger; that leaving a

pot uncovered would help its contents thicken.

I never thought much about my lack of a matrilineal food culture until after college when someone told me about how much they had valued the holidays as a chance to get a home-cooked meal.

Never had I associated going home with eating. If anything, I’d learned to bring my own food home so that I wouldn’t starve in my mother and stepfather’s house. Unlike my grandmother, eventually my mother married someone who hated cooking and eating even more than she did.

Despite our lack of family foodways, things were different a few generations back. My grandmother’s mother, Julia, was a domestic, who made her own version of the Parker House Rolls that her surviving children and grandchildren still talk about more than 30 years after her death. My grandmother’s paternal grandmother, Susie, had owned two restaurants in the 1930s and ’40s on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, including Sue’s Kitchen, which was what everyone in town came to call her. I don’t know what kind of food she served, but I do know that she made her own illegal homebrew, and tasked my grandmother and her sister with bottling it (The tween girls’ solution for the head of foam in each bottle? Lick it off).

Years would go by when I ate hardly anything my grandmother cooked. Then, one summer several years ago, when my mother and I were visiting them, I happened upon a delicious tray of pineapple chicken in the fridge. I had an intuition, but still I had to ask: “Who cooked this?”

“I did,” my grandmother said.

“Wait a minute—all this time you could cook?” She shrugged.

“So why don’t you do it more?”

Whenever I ask my grandmother to give me all that good-andgrown wisdom, stories from her childhood, hard-won insights from her 85-plus years on Earth, she balks. It always seems to come out by accident.

“Because,” she said. “When somebody loves something, you don’t take it away from them.”

Granddaddy was the family chef. Some days, all my grandmother could muster, those summers I spent with them as a child, was Hamburger Helper and ramen noodles. Even going to the grocery store was something she didn’t do until my grandfather was too ill to, and after he eventually passed away.

Now, when I am with my family, I do some of the cooking.

I make my own version of Granddaddy’s spaghetti sauce, or vegan pancakes, or halibut poached in burst tomatoes with herbs.

My love for cooking didn’t get passed down in the most obvious way. But wherever it came from I’m glad to have it as another connection to my ancestors, the ones I knew and the ones I didn’t, and their food, the taste of which I can only imagine.

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BEFORE

POEM BY ALISHA SOMMER ILLUSTRATION BY SIMONE MARTIN-NEWBERRY

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Read a book that awakens within you memories that do not belong to you yet have somehow imprinted themselves in the underlining of your skin. They are of you but not you. You can not remember when they became a part of you but you know that they are a catalyst for your being and becoming and undoing. You know that the undoing is a re-wilding—a return to a wildness that you do not yet know, or maybe you do.

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Remember.

Remember that you are of your father.

Remember that your father is of his mother.

Remember that his mother is of her mother who is of her mother who was of the low country where the sandy hills that now stretch along the South Carolina coast were once the ocean floor.

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Fix in your mind the hands of your father’s mother. How, they were the hands of her mother and her mother’s mother and how those hands may have touched indigo and rice on the plantations that lined the sandy hills that were once the ocean floor from which you came. And think of her skin salty from sweat and blackened by sun, body bent into the shape of a “u” as she cut down rice.

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Count on your thin-skinned lady fingers the number of times the spaces between her ribs cried out for rest.

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Go back to your garden where you are growing okra—6 plants so far, each one unfolding to receive you in the morning with your thin-skinned fingers and u-shaped body as you wish it into being. Call forth the hands of the hands of the hands of the mothers you never knew and yet somehow know.

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Find yourself wanting to return to the soft and wild sandy hills of the low country because every grain of sand is a seed of your origin, every splash of salt water a sip of your lineage.

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BEFORE

WORDS BY OMOLOLA OLATEJU As a youth, like many others I cherished a cup of sweet, cold Kool-Aid at home after school, at a friend’s house, or even at church. It wasn’t until my first trip to Nigeria that I understood the historical roots of Red Drink that crops up on many Black kitchen tables across the United States.

On that first trip, the short Easter break wound up as a two-month trip after my grandfather unexpectedly passed away one week into our visit.

Suddenly, I was thrust back into schoolwork in Nigeria, but discovered new joy in budding relationships with cousins and neighbors, as I was introduced to copious amounts of a tart, refreshing red drink. My 16-year-old self gulped down the Nigerian household drink in an almost alarming manner.

Zobo. Before the trip, I had never had the pleasure of drinking hibiscus beverages, but once I started there was no turning back.

Hibiscus drinks come in many forms.

The floral, and tart flavors shine through each preparation. As Adrian Miller shared with me, “In several West African societies, there is actually a hospitality drink that’s based on hibiscus. It’s most widely known as Bissap.” Adrian, the Soul Food Scholar, is the James Beard Award-winning author of the book Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time. He prides himself on being an expert on the different iterations of hibiscus drinks across the globe. “The way it’s made is you get some water, you steep the flower petals of the hibiscus plant, and then sweeten to taste,” Adrian said. “We aren’t exactly sure, but somehow hibiscus came to the Americas via the slave trade.”

Those first hibiscus petals came to North America from several areas in West

Africa. Places like modern day Ghana, Senegal, and Nigeria have all had generations of hibiscus drinkers forced to The New World. In Nigeria, zobo is still a fixture of daily culture. Woven deep into the beverage scene, it has even impacted beer culture. Bature’s Shakara Zobo Ale is flavored with hibiscus and represents the next generation of zobo consumption in Nigeria. “The idea of brewing with hibiscus stems up from wanting to use indigenous raw materials and also something that tasted fruity,” said Peace Onwuchekwa, brewer and Quality Control Supervisor for Bature Brewery in Abuja. “Hibiscus, as you know, has been used to make “Zobo drink” which is enjoyed all over the country and we thought why not make it into something alcoholic and we have our Zobo ale.”

Following the historical flow of the hibiscus drink west to Haiti, we can see how the love of hibiscus made the jump from kitchen staple to meaningful symbolism of a nation. Haiti uses hibiscus, also known as Choeblack or rose kayenn, as their national flower. Offhandedly, I asked a close friend of Haitian heritage what she thought about the importance of hibiscus in Haiti. Her response was “It’s our official flower. Well unofficially, it’s our official flower.” Haiti loves their unofficial flower so deeply that nearly a decade ago, the ministry of tourism changed its rating scale to use a system of hibiscus blooms to rate tourism establishments.

Countries peppered across the Caribbean and Central America have their own relationship with hibiscus. In Jamaica, the flower is known as sorrel and its national iteration of the drink made its way to Mexico, aptly named agua de Jamaica (Jamaica water). To date, you can easily order carne asada tacos and a

refreshing agua de Jamaica at taquerias across Mexico and the US. In the U.S., Black American households that lack a cultural tie to the Caribbean or West Africa probably are more familiar with their own Americanized version of hibiscus beverage known as “red drink.”

The drink became a Black American tradition after the last of the Texan slaves were freed in June of 1865, a full two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. To celebrate the actual Emancipation Day, the holiday of Juneteenth was born. As part of the celebrations, red foods and beverages are commonly consumed. What has perhaps been lost over time is the drink’s connection to the cultural history of Africa, and countries in the Caribbean.

Products like Kool-Aid, Big Red Soda, and other sugary drinks with a vague “red” flavor are direct descendants of drinks like zobo. Red drink isn’t one flavor: cherry, raspberry or strawberries. But it does have one root, and that’s hibiscus.

As the relevance of hibiscus in Black culture continues to evolve, it will be exciting to see a new generation embrace the ingredient in new ways. One example I found is Sankofa’s Hypebiscus, a pale ale made of organic dried hibiscus. The historic preparations are still important though, and I’m not suggesting that you replace your red drink with a proper hibiscus tea, or even raising one up as better than the other, but when you have your next red drink, remember that this is a common cup. There is a mutual love and appreciation, and a bridge between Africa, the Caribbean, and North and Central America. And for me, there is a bridge between my Nigerian heritage, and Black America. Our Blackness is deep and collective, and hibiscus is another way it shines through.

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WORDS BY AMETHYST GANAWAY Everything I’ve done in my life and career always comes back to where I’m from and the foods I ate growing up in North Charleston, South Carolina. My sense of community was built around the families who have known each other for decades and beyond, and the tables where endless meals have been shared. Picking blackberries for my grandmother’s dumplings, eating wild plums til’ I got a stomachache, and filling Piggly Wiggly bags full of fresh pecans from the neighbors’ yards were all regular occurrences. Everyone had some sort of fruit-bearing plant in their yards, where sweet snacks hung delicately over low chain-linked fences only an arm’s length away. Before farmer’s markets became popular, we bought straight from the source off the side of the road or got gifts from neighbors who may have not had much else, but always somehow had an abundance of food they were willing to share.

Going fishing and crabbing was a regular activity. I learned to catch my first crab with a piece of string tied around a piece of raw chicken to bait’um. Once you could prove yourself capable and unafraid those first few times, you were able to upgrade to a piece of string on a stick. By the time I was 13, I could peel and devein pounds of shrimp in minutes, and shuck an oyster barehanded with a knife. I could scale, gut, and fry fresh spot, whiting, and grouper alongside the watchful eyes and skilled swift hands of my granny. I learned the difference in size, shape, and flavor a male and female crab would have, and how to look at their bellies to tell them apart. I knew what the “dead man” was, and how to avoid it, and that the “mustard” of a crab was the most coveted part. Picking a crab poorly would result in you getting made fun of and your shells picked over, and that’s if you hadn’t been dismissed from the table.

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Making a perfect pot of rice was a rite of passage, and a creamy pot of grits was right alongside it. Being “no manners” wasn’t tolerated by any of our elders. You didn’t walk into someone’s house without greeting everyone, and you would always be welcomed inside with an offering of food and drink. So many traditions and stories passed down through our daily acts that I never knew other people never participated in. Crab cracks, oyster roasts, seafood boils, and fried fish on Fridays were meals where I learned valuable skills and life lessons. I learned the art of crackin’ we teet and shooting the shit sitting in backyards with best friends and play cousins in late afternoons while we ate crab and shrimp getting ate up by mosquitoes and the adults drank beer, and played pity-pat and dominos. Loud music and loud, laughing people all loving around food is all I know.

I never wanted to pursue a career in food, or never intentionally at least. As I’ve been able to reflect back on life, however, I realize that there would be no way for me to have gone into any other field and been able to feel as full and nourished as I do now. Hospitality is ingrained in who I am, and so is sharing and passing down the history of the family and folks who came before me. Hotlinks, souse, pickled eggs, smothered shrimp, okra, and greens of all kinds are ingredients or dishes I see on menus everywhere now, but I know they have been made for hundreds of years by people who look and sound like me. My gramma asked me the other day if I knew how to make gravy, and had herself a good laugh when I told her that the white folk call it a “roux.” A fancy-sounding name for something her mother and her mother before her had been making and passing down for so long.

I remember working in a kitchen with only one other Black woman and being amazed that we both knew how to clean

and cut collard greens the same exact way, but it wasn’t a skill our affluent coworkers had ever learned how to do in culinary school or at any of the fine dining restaurants where they had worked. Instances like these where I am most connected to not only my own family and culture but people who are of no relation to me, remind me why what I do is so personal and intimate and natural.

It reminds me why, truthfully most times, I want to clutch the knowledge I have acquired close to my chest and not share it with the world, but I know that the world

RECIPE

needs it even if it doesn’t deserve it. When I make a pot of rice, the entire process is as spiritual for me as praying. The murky water reminds me of the salt marshes and beaches I find myself longing for as I move further away from where I grew up.

Washing the rice as each individual grain runs between my fingers, I see every hand that has ever washed rice before in the muddled reflection. When I cook, my stove becomes an altar where I offer up the best of myself to whatever I put into the pots and pans and who I feed. It is the oldest magic I can imagine.

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Creating the first issue of For the Culture has been a massive group effort. I am deeply grateful to each person who contributed to the crowdfunding efforts to make this magazine a reality. There are some people I would like to thank for making particularly large financial contributions.

When Jenelle Kellam first approached me about her idea to organize a bake sale to support For the Culture, I had no clue how many bakers there would be or how it would work out in light of the pandemic.

It’s a credit to Jenelle, Keia Mastrianni and each baker that the For the Culture Bake Sale did so well and raised $9,252.26, which is the largest gift to For the Culture. I’m profoundly grateful for your support.

Thank you specifically to: Jenelle Kellam, Keia Mastrianni, Milk Glass Pie, Kacie Smagacz, Move that Dough Baking Co., Jasmine Macon, August June Desserts, Hannah Woociker, Moon Box Bakes, Samantha Ward, Wentworth & Fenn, Quientina Stewart, Half Moon Market, Brigitte Oger, Ashley Capps, Verdant Bread, Lisa Donovan, Natalie Robinson, Picture Perfect Events & Creations, Andrea Lever Upchurch, Cristina Agurcia, The Batch Maker, Ashley Boyd, Meghan LaVallee, Tiesha Lewis, Buttermilk Boutique, Ali Rudel, Cookies on the Side, West End Coffeehouse, Dawn Moore, Boda-Bee & The Mighty Oats, Jamie Suddoth, Jamie’s Cakes and Classes, Jamie Turner, Pinch Baked Goods, Laney JahkelParrish, East Durham Bake Shop & Market, Craft Cakes CLT. There were also extremely generous contributions to this first issue from the following supporters: Desiré Vincent Levy, Alison Cayne, Haven’s Kitchen, Kia Damon, Tucker Shaw, Sumaiya Bangee (through Bakers Against Racism), Lisa Limb (through Bakers Against Racism), Yewande Komolafe and Zoe Adjonyoh, National Partnership for Women and Families, and Matty Hart—who also provided fundraising coaching.

Finally, one of the perks of giving to the Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign above a certain level was being listed in the magazine’s thank you section. A deep bow of gratitude to the following individuals for their leadership gifts:

A POSTCARD OF THE FOR THE CULTURE BAKE SALE. PHOTO BY JOHN T. HILL. GRAPHICS BY ALANNA BASS

Ryan Patrick Sutton, Jessica Craig, Alyssa Yung, Javonne Alonzo, Sophia Roe, Little Wing Lee, Katherine Miller, Eric Alderson, Neahle Jones, Melissa Martin, Mashama Bailey, Clairdette Hamilton, Thelma Golden, Lauren Glant, Angela Leigh Raynor, Janna Meyrowitz, Anita Hamdan, Cassady Walters, Cynthia L. Wood, Mavis-Jay Sanders, Christina Bearer, Andrea Reusing, Sicily Johnson, Eric Lin, Nathalie Christian, Roxane Gay, Matt Sartwell, Ellen Houlihan, Marie Pierre, Jennifer Kouvant, Kerry Diamond, Julia Bainbridge, Julia Turshen, Adeena Sussman, Janet Elsbach, Isaac and Rose Miller, Ben Mims, Kenesha Sneed, Brandy Colbert, Bethany Harris, Lara Hamilton, Becca Parrish, Helen Rosner, E.V. Day and Ted Lee, Phil Rosenthal, Lauren Fonda and Jeff Gordinier.

Thanks to you (and every crowdfunder supporter), For the Culture was able to upgrade our printing and shipping options and offer writers and photographers a small fee for their work.

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Mutual aid. Reclaiming our foodways. Resting. Cooking. Forest bathing. Grieving. Protesting. Planting.

Building. Making space for joy. These are just a few of the ways we’ve spent time during the pandemic.

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for the culture presents What I Made During Quarantine WORDS AND PHOTOGRAPHY

BY KLANCY MILLER This is my condensed, mini-visual documentation of what I saw and how I spent my time (when I wasn’t washing dishes, working, on Zoom, writing, watching Netflix, scrolling, taking long baths, or sleeping) from March 12 through early fall 2020.

These are the things that I made, moments that felt big, and things that became part of my new routine.

It seems mostly I cooked and ate. I became an avid park goer, neighborhood explorer and picnic zealot. I could have easily done an homage to all the TV I watched.

Have I ever consumed so much content? The Last Dance. Verzuz.

Girlfriends. Never Have I Ever.

Insecure. I May Destroy You. Gossip Girl (all six seasons). The Bureau. The Undoing. Somehow, it has all helped me through this moment in time.

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DURING

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Cocktail Hour with Dr. Jessica B. Harris WORDS BY FABIENNE TOBACK AND KARIS JAGGER PHOTOGRAPHY BY KELLY MARSHALL

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DURING Dr. Jessica B. Harris is an award-winning author. She has written 12 books documenting the food of the African diaspora. In 2020, she received the James Beard Lifetime Achievement Award. Karis Jagger and Fabienne Toback, friends and producing partners, met Jessica after optioning her book, High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America, which is currently being made into a documentary series.

Karis and Fabienne, both based in Los Angeles, had virtual cocktails with Jessica while she enjoyed a Rum Punch in her summer home on Martha’s Vineyard.

Fabienne Toback: I’m going to take a screenshot for our “HeySistah Friday Cocktail.” I’m having a mocktail because it’s too early and I don’t have any wine.

Jessica B. Harris: Then it’s not that it’s too early, it’s that you ran out.

Karis Jagger: I’m enjoying some Rosé.

Too early. Never.

JBH: The sun’s always over the yardarm somewhere.

KJ: How is Martha’s Vineyard?

JBH: My yard is maybe three postage stamps as opposed to one postage stamp in New York. But everybody is going by the house saying “Oh, that’s such a pretty garden” so that makes me happy. The tomato plants came up from Brooklyn and they are happy. I bought the “zucchini that devoured Cleveland” to go with them. I’ve got an incredible strawberry pot that’s putting out berries every day.

FT: Tell us about your home.

JBH: It’s what they call a Gingerbread Cottage. It’s a 19th century wooden tent basically. They used to have Methodist campgrounds up here and the house got moved off the campground probably at the end of the 19th century beginning of the 20th. And literally, the inside wall is the outside wall. People just pushed it out a variety of ways and put things above it and so forth. My parents bought it in 1957.

KJ: Why did they choose Martha’s Vineyard?

JBH: Long and crazy story. My dad, in his grade school days in Tennessee, in what I can only imagine was a one room schoolhouse, had a teacher who somehow had been up here and told him “Tales of The Vineyard,” and he remembered. He had an incredible memory for stuff in general. He also read those teeny tiny quarter of an inch real estate ads in the back on the Sunday Times. He saw one that said, “House on Martha’s Vineyard,” in ‘56 and said to my mother, “let’s go up.”

We used to go, it all sounds very grand, to East Hampton. But East Hampton back then was potato fields.

It wasn’t The Hamptons. So instead of going to East Hampton we went up to The Vineyard. He just happened to have the ad with him, lowly six months after having seen it, and the house was still for sale. It was in pretty strange condition. It had been owned by two spinster sisters, who lived in it with no hot water, no shower or bathtub or anything like that.

The only heat was a big coal stove in the kitchen. Dad was ready to back away from it, but my mother was like, “No, Jesse, we can do this.” My mother and father were an incredible team. There was enough, some kind of way, to make the down payment, and we bought the house back then for the royal sum of $4,000. I don’t think I’ve missed a year in 63 years.

KJ: We know you’re an only child and were very close to your parents. What about your grandparents?

JBH: My grandfathers died before I was born. My grandmothers were each wonderful in a different way. I saw my mother’s mother less. She lived in Plainfield, New Jersey. She was a

minister’s wife and after my grandfather died, became the “mother of the church.”

When she turned 50 or 60, she had raised her kids, she went to school and got a beauty culture degree. She began to work as a beautician. An opportunity came up to go to, what was then called, the Holy Land. And damned if she didn’t decide she was going to raise some money and go. Gosh, I haven’t thought about this in years. We went to see her off because she was going by boat. At that point, boats had three classes, tourist, cabin and first. We looked for her in tourist class. No Grandma Jones. Looked for her in cabin class, no Grandma Jones.

Grandma Jones had decided that if she was going, she was going first class!

She kept a diary of her trip, I looked at it before I came up here. She had the diary mimeographed because there was no Xerox back then, and she gave copies to all her kids. She was the first one in the family to go on a plane. One of the things she did was crochet. She talked about looking out of the window of the plane, down on the Holy Land, and seeing how the trees looked like little crochet bumps.

She was a riot.

I saw my paternal grandmother a lot. My father insisted upon it. I used to spend time with her every summer.

She lived in the South Jamaica projects.

During the day while my mother was working, she dropped me off there. I dreaded it because my grandmother would always make me go downstairs and “play with the kids.” They were not nice to me, they teased me, but she would force me, and I did. The kids and I learned how to, social distance and respect each other and then I could go upstairs and read. My father’s mother wrote poetry.

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FT: Did you get your love of writing from her?

FT: How would you describe that period in New York?

JBH: My love of writing is a combination of a whole lot of things I suspect. I love language. I like the opportunities that language gives. I like the ability to be able to play with language, to enjoy language, to change a word and change the meaning. I think that comes from school. I think that comes from learning another language early because I learned French very early.

JBH: I think I probably said it better in My Soul Looks Back but it was a “Hub of the Universe” city. It was like Paris in the Belle Epoque or London in the swinging 60s. In terms of arts, culture and history, it was THE place. It was grittier, not the cosmetically enhanced New York we have nowadays. But it was a city that was vibrant, that was breathing.

KJ: You learned French at the United Nations school. Where did you go after?

JBH: I had gone to the High School for Performing Arts in theater and then went to Bryn Mawr and majored in French.

I did a junior year abroad with people I’m still very much in touch with. I did a summer school course at Queen’s and then they offered me a job. I went and did graduate work in France, came back to that job and quite frankly kept that job for the next 50 years. I taught French for the first seven years. And then there was that massive upheaval in New York when the budgets went crazy and I was furloughed. When I came back, they said “we’d like you to teach English because we know you have a career as a journalist.” So then spent the next 43 years teaching English. That was the only job I ever had. Everything else was an adornment.

KJ: Your journalism career started at the same time?

JBH: Exactly. Remember for me, the journalism, the food, all of it is an avocation not necessarily a vocation.

It was sort of my side hustle. I was a theater critic for the Amsterdam News.

I’ve been told I was the first Black woman to vote for the Tony’s. I wrote for Travel Weekly. I was a book review editor, a features writer, and then ultimately the travel editor at Essence.

The journalism started back in the Black Arts Era.

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that they were colonial was probably less compelling than the fact that they were postcards of bygone days on the continent.

FT: The postcards ask more questions than give answers. I love this one.

FT: Your memoir describes this period in New York so beautifully. Tell us about your other books.

JBH: I think he’s just so amazing. I want to give him a hug and pinch those cheeks and just say, “it’ll be okay.” I know nothing about him. We don’t even know his name. He’s just a “dinner toter.”

Now, does that mean he’s carrying dinner to a relative or does that mean he’s carrying dinner as a job?

JBH: Well 13 food related, 18 in total.

There’s the memoir, a translation of a French play, a French textbook and two Bantam guides, a guide to Paris and a guide to France.

JBH: With every postcard you can make up so many stories. I’m talking with a playwright who wants to write monologues based on the cards and what she thinks the interior conversation is.

KJ: Your new book, Vintage Postcards from the African World, begins with your earlier adventures in Paris. Your stories of collecting postcards, the auction houses and shops, are fascinating.

FT: This one reminds me of your mom Karis. There’s such a timelessness for the fashion. The faces look so contemporary.

JBH: I collect everything, honey, if it collects dust. That is my mantra.

FT: You started with colonial postcards?

JBH: If you’re talking about the photographic image of West Africa, it is of necessity going to be colonial, because that’s when photography came in. The fact

Left: Dinner toter; far left: Caribbean Woman

DURING JBH: These are the faces of the ancestors. These are grandparents, great grandparents, great-great grandparents, in some cases, but not much beyond that. These are people who are related to folks that we may know. When they got to those Doors of No Return, they just said, “you go on that boat, you go on that boat” and ¡Basta! That was how it went.

will call. That gets into the Black Lives Matter of things. If I had been able to sell some books like those other folks, but the writing has always been something I did for love. You know, A Chorus Line, “What I did for Love”?

‘Cuz it ain’t been about money.

reading an old article from 1998 about Billie Holiday and “Strange Fruit.” And we like to think that we are not there, but you know, “Southern Trees bear Strange Fruit,” but they’re not just Southern.

FT: What are your views of what’s going on right now?

KJ: What are your plans now that you’ve retired from Queens College?

JBH: I think that the ingenuity and the purposefulness of the people involved is heartening and reminds me of older days. I was never, per se, a person to go on protest marches. I am crowd phobic. My methods and ways of protesting are different. But there’s something heartening about the way that it has sparked internationally.

There’s so clearly a triangulation of effects in the United States. There is the political situation, which has a lot of people’s teeth on edge. There is the pandemic, which has kept an awful lot of people at home and not just physically sequestered, but also in their heads.

And if you spend two and a half months or so in your head, all sorts of things can happen. I think that’s part of what we’re seeing. And then there is the fact that we’re living in this era of social media.

I can’t speak to the horrors of watching Mr. Floyd’s death because I can’t and will not do that.

It’s just ugly, ugly, ugly. You look at Breonna, you look at Ahmaud, you look at this litany of names and it is just so horrific. I’m

KJ: I love the word you use in your work, commensality, the practice of eating together. We have traveled to Africa together but not cooked a meal together. Lastly, what would you cook for us?

JBH: Well, I had some lectures all set up, none of which are happening. You know, the wonderful world of pandemics.

FT: We definitely think the awareness of your name and your contribution to the lexicon of food history is going to change that.

JBH: Let us pray. People are kind, so that’s a good thing. I’m doing some articles now. Hopefully more people

FT: So true.

JBH: What I tend to serve people is not necessarily what I write about. I would do a leg of lamb. I grow lavender up here, so I’d use some of my own lavender along with herbes de Provence.

I have fresh rosemary, so fresh as well as dried. I prick the lamb and put garlic in it, rosemary and a little lavender. I then do a black pepper, herbes de Provence and salt crust.

KJ: Yum. JBH: I usually do a quick wrap with cheesecloth and red wine and let the crust adhere. Shove that in the oven and because I’m getting lazier as I get older.

I will sometimes, instead of using a rack, just cook the lamb over a bed of new potatoes so that the drippings are going onto the potatoes. Then serve those potatoes with a yogurt sauce almost like a Greek tzatziki. Then I do my quick down and dirty rum mint jelly. Put a bottle of mint jelly in a saucepan, melt it down, add a couple of glugs of rum.

And then usually, haricots verts.

KJ: You have picked the perfect meal for me and Fab. We love your playlist in My Soul Looks Back. Will you make us one?

JBH: I’ll send you a playlist.

KJ/FT: Thank you. Bonne nuit! A bientôt, j’espère.

JBH: Moi aussi. Take care, be well, stay safe and have another glass of wine.

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DURING

The 1918 Influenza Blues WORDS BY ZELLA PALMER PHOTOGRAPHY BY LESLIE GAMBONI

I

n 2018, my deceased grandmother Mary, known to her grandchildren as “Mur,” came to me in a dream. She does that sometimes, warning me when tragedy or triumph is coming. I woke up afraid and concerned, knowing that something wasn’t right. A few months after my dream, I remember reading an article commemorating the 1918 Spanish Influenza. Flashbacks of Mur came in my head remembering the day she told me about her own experience with the Spanish Influenza. I will never forget that day.

Mur was born in 1910, the daughter of one of the most prominent Black doctors in the early 20th century, Dr. Joseph Henry Ward. Mur was an incredible storyteller, her stories always captivated my attention. Every detail drew me in closer to her and closer to my ancestors. I could see the child she once was behind the grey hair and glasses. Mur was like all of us, trying to make sense of things in a world that is oftentimes stacked against us.

The last decade of her life, she wanted to tell her story, she even wrote it down in beautiful cursive in countless dollar notebooks. She wanted us to know what happened so that we wouldn’t forget her or those who came before her. So many of us go to the grave and don’t tell our stories, leaving generations without a roadmap or clear understanding of how we got over.

For Mur, it was like yesterday, the loss of her only brother to the 1918 Spanish Influenza.

For months, my namesake Zella Locklear-Ward, who was Mur’s mother, and her only brother, Buddy, were all quarantined in their Indianapolis home. Zella’s husband, Ward,

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DURING was a lieutenant colonel and one of the few Black surgeons in World War I. When Mur told me her story, I imagined Zella, her husband off to war trying to prove to the world that Black men are men, while she was back in Indianapolis caring for her young children during a pandemic that killed 20 to 50 million people worldwide, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

Mur remembered Zella draping purple cloth over their front door once it was confirmed that everyone in the house had Spanish Influenza. They lay in bed, struck with fever and chills. Zella tried to cure her young children with whatever remedies she remembered from her Lumbee Native roots. One morning, Buddy woke up from his feverish sleep and said goodbye to his mother and sister. His lifeless nine-year-old body was carried out on a stretcher and a telegram was sent to Ward alerting him of the death of his only son.

Eventually, Ward returned from France to Zella, Mur, his medical practice and his cherished patient, Madam C.J. Walker—a relationship detailed in A’Lelia Bundles’s On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker. As the number of COVID cases increased and my own daughter became ill, I wondered how our ancestors dealt with the 1918 Spanish Influenza and the disease of racism. How were they able to heal after so much death?

I think about them now more than ever, especially during our modern pandemic.

In March, I was in Atlanta with my best friend who lives in Abuja, Nigeria, for a much-needed girls trip. I remember our last meal together at Bamba Senegalese Restaurant. We munched on the most divine dibi khar, grilled lamb chops with a tangy mustard sauce that would make you stomp your feet and praise the beautiful Senegalese woman who made the dish with so much love. A week later, the world was quarantined, and my best friend was stuck in North America.

Countless global citizens were stranded, praying to return to their home country. For those without family in the United States, the vacations turned into unforeseen hotel bills. After three months of being stranded, my friend was able to return to Nigeria but

not without government intervention and many COVID tests. Hollywood couldn’t have written this script. No zombie or apocalyptic movie could have prepared us for this pandemic.

I returned to New Orleans, quickly adapting to teaching online, Dillard University Food Studies. Our classes became therapy sessions. Some of my students tested positive, and unfortunately a few lost family members. We prayed together in moments of sadness. The previous lessons taught in my class on food security were now all too real and personal.

We encouraged each other to grow food in our backyards and forage our own Louisiana elderberry, as our local grocery stores’ shelves were depleted of vitamins and essential staples.

New Orleans Black chefs and caterers called asking for business advice and resources. Any money made during Mardi Gras was short lived. Every festival was canceled, including the New Orleans Jazz Festival, a huge financial loss for many New Orleans musicians, restaurants, and caterers, only a year after the loss of New Orleans culinary icon, Leah Chase.

I worried about Ms. Linda Green, known as the “Yakamein Lady,” New Orleans’ favorite caterer, the last of her generation, a gatekeeper of old New Orleans dishes, pre-Katrina. Ms. Linda, like Leah Chase, is from a generation of strong Black matriarchal cooks. We need to cherish them with every part of our being before they are gone.

Although Ms. Linda never opened up a brick-and-mortar restaurant, she caters every major New Orleans festival and event in the city. Every Black community across the globe, from the mama put in Nigeria to the sellers of homemade plates in New Orleans has a Ms. Linda. My mind was racing late at night. How would she take care of her grandchildren? How would we, as a community, support the Black women who feed us from nontraditional food businesses? How would we make sure that Black women like Ms. Linda, receive financial support without risking their lives to feed their families?

None of us were prepared for a pandemic nor the continuum of racial

injustice and police brutality. My garden became my peace of mind. I thought, If I could just grow enough food, I could feed my family and community. I could also heal my daughter with medicinal plants.

I’m not the only one. Krystle Cameron, a Native New Orleans resident and founder of For the HortiCulture, built garden bed prototypes to revive New Orleans Black gardening culture when Teedys, a.k.a Aunties, grew mirlitons, peppers and okra from their yards. Another New Orleanian, Rahn Broady, teacher, gardener, and community activist made his front porch a sanctuary for hospitality workers and those in need of food, starter plants, masks, or medicine.

My heart broke seeing Black-owned restaurants close their doors, praying that it was only temporary. They all knew there was no protection and financial cushion for them. As discussed on a June 27 episode of the podcast “The NOLADrinks Show with Bryan Dias,” the same restaurant groups that always get the FEMA contracts and emergency loans would ride this pandemic like a yacht. Not even Chef Nina Compton’s well-respected and highly publicized restaurant group would be granted a loan.

After Hurricane Katrina, Black-owned restaurant ownership grew exponentially.

Young Black entrepreneurs tired of working for pennies in fine dining kitchens did whatever it took to open their own establishments. Restaurants like Morrow’s, We Dat’s Chicken, Heard Dat Kitchen, Neyow’s Creole Cafe and The Munch Factory became destinations for every Black celebrity from Beyoncé to Drake.

New Orleans Black-owned restaurants flipped homemade food plates and street food to brick-and-mortar restaurants frequented by tourists, locals and celebrities without any traditional financial support.

Ms. Leah’s words from my own book, Recipes and Remembrances of Fair Dillard: 1869-2019, still applied, “We were never taught how to run a business. We just did it.

It’s amazing how they taught themselves.”

The achievements of Black restaurateurs and street food vendors in New Orleans remain the most undervalued story in national food media, resulting in a lack

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of national brand awareness and access to the same financial resources as their white counterparts. New Orleans Black culinary matriarchs left an indelible mark on American culinary history. National food media provides generic stories, rather than critical analysis of how these Black women built empires in the Jim Crow South.

From Post-Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Movement, Black culinary matriarchs like Nellie Murray, Rose Nicaud, Lulu White, Lena Richard, and, most recently, the late Leah Chase built tremendous wealth in New Orleans, unlike any other American city. Their legacies must be preserved, celebrated, analyzed, and studied.

Murray, the 19th century Leah Chase, built her wealth by catering to the most prominent elites from New Orleans to New York. She introduced Louisiana Creole cuisine to the world at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago—the same World’s Fair where Nancy Green became the face of Aunt Jemima. Murray, formerly enslaved by Louisiana Governor Paul Octave Hebert, learned from her grandmother and mother how to cook and serve white elites. The lessons she learned from the women in her family would be used to her advantage after the Civil War to build tremendous wealth and fame. I’ve written about her before, in a piece for 64 Parishes titled “Queen of Creole Cuisine: Nelly Murray on European Cooking. The Louisiana Colored Woman, Expert as a Chef, Who Made a Tour of the Old World, In Miss Howard’s Service, Gives Her Opinion On the Art of Living Over the Oceans, and Draws, Interesting Contrasts.” This was the title of a featured article in the March 18, 1894, issue of the New Orleans Daily Picayune about a formerly enslaved woman of African descent who became the “Queen of New Orleans Creole cuisine.” Nellie Murray was the caterer for the “New Orleans Four Hundred,” the ultra-fashionable circle of aristocratic families. “Nellie is every inch a lady, as she could not but be when it is remembered that from her birth upwards she always associated with the elite of the city and the state,” the article declared.

“All fashionable New Orleans knows how Nellie is always in demand for every elegant déjeuner à la fourchette, luncheon

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and swell dinner, and they know that when a ‘function’ of this kind is placed in her hands their guests will be served with such savory dishes as would make an epicure of Ancient Rome crown her with laurels.

This was an excerpt from the premier mainstream New Orleans newspaper only three decades after the end of slavery, considering the opinion of a formerly enslaved Black woman on European cooking and the art of living and traveling abroad. Murray amassed a fortune and was, according to that same newspaper, “hailed as an aristocrat for all that her skin is dark.” Today, Murray’s descendant, Alden McDonald Jr. is the President and CEO of Liberty Bank, a New Orleans Black-owned bank since 1972.

In the mid-18th century, Rose Nicaud bought her freedom after selling coffee and calas, sweet fried rice fritters, on the streets of New Orleans. Nicaud was able to

expand her business to the French Market, rent stalls, hire other Black women and inspire other marchandes, Black women street food vendors, to start their own business.

“Her coffee was like the benediction that follows after prayer; or, if you prefer, like the bendictine after dinner,” wrote Catherine Cole, in the 1916 book The Story of the Old French Market.

Before Starbucks, Café du Monde or Morning Call, Nicaud and Black women who aspired to be her served the best cups of café noir, café au lait and piping hot sweet calas after Sunday Mass. Nicaud’s persona and business savvy in 18th century New Orleans was groundbreaking.

In the late 19th century, Lulu White, the Madam of Storyville, owned and operated Mahogany Hall, the most lucrative bordello in New Orleans’s red-light district. White, known as the Diamond Queen, advertised

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her sex workers and bordello in the Blue Book directory to white men with fantasies of the antebellum South. White’s and others’ bordello advertisements not only featured images of sex workers but offered free plates of red beans and rice, special room service menus, Champagne, jazz, and a promise to entertain customers in “unquestionably the most elaborately furnished house in the city of New Orleans, and without a doubt one of the most elegant palaces in this or any other country,” writes Emily Epstein Landau in her 2018 article “The Notorious, Mixed-Race New Orleans Madam Who Turned Her Identity Into a Brand,” for the website Zócalo Public Square. White was a self-made millionaire and property owner. Powerful and connected, she flaunted her wealth in Jim Crow’s face. Before New Orleans Bourbon Street, Atlanta’s Magic City or Las Vegas, White understood American consumer

culture, racist fetishization of Black women and the power of branding. White was a pioneer for sex worker rights, according to “The Last Days of Storyville,” by Sally Asher for MyNewOrleans.com.

White immediately filed a writ of injunction against the city to avoid moving, arguing that it deprived her of the use of her property without due process of law, constituted unnecessary and arbitrary abuse of police power, and violated the constitution by denying her equal protection under the law. After filing the writ, the Louisiana Supreme Court held the ordinance unconstitutional. The city then drafted a new ordinance, No. 4485, aimed at the same goal, and White supplemented her petition accordingly. A temporary injunction was soon granted and other black madams followed suit, including Willie Piazza, Sweetie Miller, Lucille White, and Minnie Williams. In the end, more than twenty property owners (primarily black women but also two white brothel owners), filed suit. The cases went all the way to the Louisiana Supreme Court, which ruled that the city was “powerless” to prevent women of color from living and working in Storyville. The court held that the ordinance was in violation of the 14th Amendment, which held that one of the essentials to liberty was the right of an individual to reside where they desired.

In 1917, Storyville was shut down by the United States government. Concerned evangelical Northern military mothers organized and created propaganda after discovering their sons were loyal brothel customers. White was arrested for violating the Draft Act, prohibiting prostitution within ten-mile radius of a military facility.

President Woodrow Wilson commuted White’s sentence after she served three months, writes Al Rose in Storyville, New Orleans: Being an Authentic, Illustrated Account of the Notorious Red-Light District. Every bordello and building in Storyville was torn down. White’s exquisite Mahogany Hall, valued at $1 million dollars today, was destroyed.

Bourbon Street would become a version of Storyville, controlled and owned by majority white males.

In the 1940s, Lena Richard, “was the

‘Martha Stewart’ of New Orleans—a trained chef, acclaimed cookbook author, restaurant and catering business owner, frozen food entrepreneur, TV host and cooking school teacher. With skillful élan, Richard artfully tore down racial and economic barriers in the heart of the Jim Crow South, improving the livelihoods of current and future African Americans in her community,” writes Lily Katzman in “Meet Lena Richard, the Celebrity Chef Who Broke Barriers in the Jim Crow South,” for Smithsonian.com. Richard’s remarkable mid-20th century success not only built wealth for herself and her family, but for countless Black women in New Orleans looking for opportunity and an exit from domestic work.

Leah Chase, the late Queen of New Orleans Creole Cuisine, former chef and co-owner of Dooky Chase Restaurant was one of the most brilliant restaurateurs in American culinary history. Chase fed American and international presidents, Martin Luther King Jr., Ray Charles, and the City of New Orleans. Chase was a super connector. She understood people and the power of Black culture. Chase knew what we needed, a refuge, a safe space where we could see beauty in ourselves. Every dish served was rooted in Black New Orleans existence and Creole culture. By the time she passed, after leaving a legacy of excellence and service to her people, all of her children and grandchildren were groomed to run the restaurant and other business ventures.

As New Orleans and the world grapple with COVID-19 that disproportionately affects Black and brown communities, we must rely on our ancestors’ strength and imagination. Their stories and Mur’s survival during the 1918 Spanish Influenza are our bibles, sacred archives that can guide us through this. In the most volatile times in history, they rose like phoenixes.

Our collective global consciousness to fight for Black lives, create Black wealth, health and food security sets precedent for a tangible global Black future. Black food media and Black women in food, have a huge responsibility and opportunity to reclaim our foodways and legacy for the culture.

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ILLUSTRATION BY ANTONIA BROWN

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Survival Tools in the Age of Corona with Mennlay Golokeh Aggrey and Jenna Wortham WORDS BY MARTINE THOMPSON PHOTOGRAPHY BY TZVETELINA GARNEVA AND KLANCY MILLER

2020 was…a lot. We lived through an exhausting presidential election, a global pandemic, and symptoms from that white supremacy / capitalism / patriarchy link-up boiling over in a way many of us had never experienced.

Curious as ever about how everyone is tending to their wellness needs on a personal and communal level, we checked in with two individuals—whose work and wellness practices inspire and resonate with us deeply—about how they’ve been practicing self-care during the ongoing COVID-19 quarantine.

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Mennlay Golokeh Aggrey M

ennlay has been spending time at home in Mexico City these days. The author of The Art of Weed Butter and 15-year interdisciplinary cannabis professional, whose work explores “cannabis and the diasporic connections between Africa and Latin America,” has been alleviating stress from the “international limbo” of election season with daily stretching and being more intentional about eating decently. While some of Mennlay’s ideal ways to recharge aren’t exactly within reach right now — bathing in a forest and not talking to anybody for two weeks, for instance — she feels fortunate to be able to tend to creative duties from home. What sort of hats does this cannabis-loving Gemini wear? She is co-founder and creative director of Xula, a Latinx and Black-owned CBD brand, co-host of Broccoli Talk podcast by Broccoli, a magazine for cannabis lovers, and the founder of a benefit pop-up dinner, Cenas sin fronteras.

Cannabis, which Mennlay first found her way to as a teen, has offered her a space to just be. “The epiphanies come and they fire off so much that sometimes I think I forget that this is that connection to the divine or at least to my sense of what that would be,” she says, reflecting on her time turning to the herb while struggling with depression and teenage angst in the 90s. “Cannabis has really cracked open that ability and that knowledge of self. I think that has always been the overarching reason why I reach for herb and it continues to be that salve for depression and for the anxiety of just being alive in this world.

But it’s also a chance to be more playful with myself and to bring back that shadow work from my childhood. There’s something in that that I’m often playing out or processing as a form of healing. And cannabis 100% brings me back to that. It sort of stops time and allows me to feel my body, like, ‘Do I need to stretch? Do my plants need to be watered? Do I want to cook something nourishing?’ It really gives you that time to pause.”

Being present for tiny pockets of self-care, as Mennlay puts it, like the ritual of applying lotion and shea butter, practicing meditation, and granting her body a yoga session when it craves it has also been helpful during the acclimation to this new normal. As chaos and uncertainty around America’s future continue to fill news cycles, Mennlay has been reminiscing on her time living in Northern California, and being healed, held, and immersed in nature. The question of how she can incorporate that kind of tranquility into her life in Mexico is a reoccurring one. Maybe it means moving to some small town and having a humble backyard, where growing vegetables and digging into cooking more and experimenting with cannabis infusions feels more accessible. Time will tell, but what’s for certain is the conversation of how to infuse more peace, more joy, more good feels into the everyday is a lifelong chat Mennlay is glad to be having with herself.

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Jenna Wortham A nswering a question like “How are you doing emotionally?” is a complicated query for Jenna to untangle at this moment in time. The sound healer, reiki practitioner, herbalist, and community care worker, who also works as a staff writer at the New York Times, co-hosts the podcast Still Processing, and is co-editor of the anthology Black Futures (along with Kimberly Drew), is in Cape Cod for an artist residency hosted by Twenty Summers—a healing breather away from New York City life that’s allowed her to tap more into the medicinal properties of nature. She’s explaining how much of her journey has consisted of venturing beneath the surface, and deepening her understanding of living within a system that fully embraces the disregard of Black people’s humanity. There are no simple answers when it comes to caring for herself and others while living through the horrific, painful, and deeply depleting symptoms of this reality, but community, pouring into it and leaning on it, as well as being deliberate about acts that nourish her, remain vital parts of her wellness practice.

“It’s so interesting because this pain is not new. It’s actually the most familiar thing. I think I’ve just wallpapered over it at different points in my life either because I felt like I had to, or because I didn’t feel like the culture or society was ready to hear about it. I think a lot about the cost of externalizing so much grief and so much pain and so much sorrow onto some platforms that monetize it essentially, and that have no real interest in preserving it or protecting it. So I think I feel like I can live more fully in that sorrow and live fully in that grief and make space for it. I don’t have to apologize for it or hide it as much, and that helps cope with it, that helps normalize it, that helps transmute it because one of the goals for me is not to ignore or mask or push down, and suppress these heavy emotions and feelings, but to try to process them and move through them and share them and then continue on because it’s just one of the facets of being a Black person in the world.”

Through growth and community, Jenna has come to understand that making space for joy and rest is a must. Healing spaces, particularly those equipped and eager to hold space for the nuances of Black healing, have also been a lifeforce. As she continues on her path, learning more about the natural world and how it’s “always providing for us” has brought a profound sense of peace. “These are things that my great-grandmothers have used, and that even my parents have used,” she says of tapping back into the lineage of knowledge, care, and herbal medicine. To be able to cultivate a special relationship with nature, and remain connected to the process from start to finish, makes sharing healing elixirs like bath oils and herbal tinctures with loved ones feel even more precious.

“I think that’s been the most productive way for me to use the knowledge I’ve gained, which is just taking care of those around me because they do support me in return and it creates its own feedback loop of sweetness that has become really lifesaving these last six months, but really over the last several years of my life. It feels really clarifying and it feels really special. I do feel connected to the past in that way, which I think is really important to remember that these things are not new and are so much older than we know. Also, to give thanks. Every time I’m in a new place, I look at the Native Land app to look at who the original stewards of this land were to always give thanks to the land and give thanks to them. And apologize, which I think really matters. I feel best when I feel in harmony with the landscape around me. And so it’s all part of that.”

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Fermentation and Fugitivity WORDS BY MAKSHYA TOLBERT

As a cook, slavery haunts me. Its archive is as present with me as my knife bag. What Saidiya Hartman calls the “afterlife of slavery” materializes across my work in kitchens and on farms.

I know I am not alone. Kitchens have always been brutal for Black women. Under slavery, kitchens were the most hostile sites for Black women across plantation life. In trying to understand slavery, I admit to myself that parts of this work will always scare me. This shadow accompanied me to grad school in Northwest Italy, where my mood is low and bleak all of the time.

The Middle Passage was always meant to be a fracturing. We were never supposed to survive, or to bring our foodways with us. Plantation life intended to reduce Black folks to commodities. Yet enslaved Black cooks across plantations snuck dignity into their work, fermenting foods, and drawing from African techniques that survived the Middle Passage. In some cases, enslaved Black people grew enough surplus to sell and exchange food with nearby Indigenous communities.

These relationships were profound. Indigenous people taught enslaved folks additional techniques to smoke, pickle, and salt meat, forage fish, and fresh vegetables.

Furtive ways of feeding each other were critical to their survival.

In Stolen Life, Fred Moten clarifies fugitivity as “a desire for and a spirit of escape and transgression of the proper and the proposed… A desire for the outside.” For Black people living through plantation life, fugitivity was a skill. Enslaved Black people were fermenting the foods grown in their doorstep gardens and plots: collards, cucumbers, cabbages, green tomatoes, and more.

They made medicine and fermented sweet watermelon rind pickles, brandy peaches, and apple cider. I’m grateful for how Black people nourish each other, even in impossible conditions — this insistence on life opens me up. This legacy comes to mind when I am at work in kitchens. It softens the shadow.

Fermentation’s etymology breaks down to “seething, pushing toward effervescence; figuratively anger, passion.” To ferment is to bring things to new life. For enslaved Black folks to ferment feels like a breaking out

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of sorts, an example of what Black feminist historian Saidiya Hartman calls “a refusal of that which has been refused to you.” Every time Black people cooking on plantations chose to create life, fermentation or otherwise, doing so was a refusal. Their refusal is visceral across Black foodways, then and now.

So much of the alchemy of slave foodways hinges on the hiding. For the enslaved, the choice to hide anything was riddled with violent stakes. In their cabins, Black folks built root cellars where they could store tools, storage crops like potatoes and onions, and fermented foods. Root cellars contained smoked, cured, and saltcured vegetables, an abundance of new life lurking underneath their floorboards. On small and large plantations alike, Black communities grew, hid, traded, hid, fermented, hid, and fed each other. Their legacy is a light this year, as the pandemic widens beyond what we thought possible. I tell myself we can survive this, and I know I am part of an echo across space and time.

I think of these fugitive ferments often, especially since finishing Abby Fisher’s 1881 cookbook, What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Southern Cooking. Fisher published the book after fleeing the South with her husband and three kids after the Civil War. Unable to read, Fisher dictated the book to a women’s publishing collective in Berkeley.

I was moved to start with her “Plain Pickles,” which she says can be “any vegetable you want to pickle under this head...covering thickly with salt, and repeating layers and salt until you have under brine all you desire to pickle.” I have worked my way through Mrs. Fisher’s recipe multiple times. I still haven’t managed to get my hands on a barrel — her preferred storage method. It makes sense that this work attempts to feed many at once. Enslaved Black communities worked together to survive the insufficient food rations they were allocated.

Ferments reconnect me with the eternal legacies of creativity and fugitivity of which I am a part. They move me toward what the collective, Queer Nature calls “the perilous journey back to ourselves.” They connect me to the deep wisdoms of Blackness and community, and toward futures where, again, we have won.

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When in Rome: Lunch at Enqutatash WORDS BY JACQUELINE GREAVES PHOTOGRAPHY BY SARA K. BERHANU

I

am embarrassed to say that in all my years of traveling back and forth to Italy, I have never thought of going to an Ethiopian restaurant. Why is it shocking? Why would an Ethiopian restaurant be a draw when on a food trip to Italy? How many of you know that there were two wars between the two countries? Italy, like most Western European countries, has a colonial past—not triumphant, but real. The first war was 1895 - 1896.

Years later, under Benito Mussolini, Italy again unsuccessfully attempted to annex Ethiopia (1935 - 46). It means that there is a strong historical tie between these two countries and that Ethiopians have also immigrated to Italy. There are more than 8,000 Ethiopians living in Italy today.

However, my focus here is Ethiopian food. Being Jamaican I was quite interested and curious given its reputation for spiciness with berbere being the special spice blend made with ginger, cardamom, coriander, fenugreek seeds, nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, allspice, paprika, hot pepper flakes, black pepper, and salt. I love spices and they are a very important part of Ethiopian cuisine—according to its culture, women with the best berbere recipe have the strongest chance of getting a good husband.

For the first issue of For the Culture, I was asked to find the best Ethiopian restaurant in Rome. I bombarded many of my expat African American friends, Dominican Italian friends, and even an Ethiopian friend who had spent a few years in Italy researching

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for her novel that takes place during the second Ethiopian-Italian war, The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste, for suggestions.

Everyone called their friends and I did some research online, and eventually all roads led to Ristorante Africano Enqutatash. Enqutatash means “gift of jewels” and is a reference to the story of the Queen of Sheba the ancient queen of Ethiopia. It also refers to the end of the three months of rainy season and to the new period of sunshine and the New Year.

It is a word strongly linked to the cultural and religious history of Ethiopia and is a word of great beauty and respect.

I invited two of my Italian nephews because, well, they were ignorant of Italy’s Ethiopian past, and it was my duty as their aunt—their Jamaican aunt at that—to instruct them. Despite many a young Italian male being shipped off to Abyssinia in 1935, including my husband’s paternal grandfather, despite one of its biggest gifts to the world—how many people know

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that coffee is originally from Ethiopia? It seems the great reverence that Italians give to coffee stems from those Italian war years. Food is a great way to introduce history and culture and we all love to eat, so off we were to explore the menu of Enqutatash.

The restaurant was relatively empty when we arrived. It was lunchtime in early July, vacation season, following months of quarantine due to COVID-19. Restaurants in Italy were just beginning to reopen.

Fortunately, the owner Giovanni Ghirlanda and his Ethiopian wife, who is in charge of the kitchen but requested not to be mentioned by name, were able to dedicate a lot of time to our table. It is important to remember that it is a culinary culture based on communal eating, so everyone eats from the same dish. My nephews were shocked as they had never before encountered this social practice. I wonder what Italian soldiers thought when they first disembarked in Ethiopia. Giovanni,

whose mother is Ethiopian and father Italian, was our Virgil, showing off his 20 years of experience as a restaurateur. His wife prepared the food and he gleefully told other tables that he absolutely had to teach us to eat the food according to Ethiopian practices. We laughed with him, because he was so obviously happy to be our culinary guide.

We thought it was a must to begin with the marvelous couscous with vegetables and beef, and the sambusa— fried curry-chopped-meat-filled flaky triangle similar to an Indian samosa. The latter was served with a special spicy tomato sauce called sils. It was hot and had a strong vinegary flavor. Our next step was choosing from the many rich and spicy stews and vegetable dishes. Giovanni suggested a selection of meat stews and vegetables, his favorite, but I was curious about the chicken and vegan dishes.

Ethiopian cuisine has a variety of excellent vegetarian and vegan selections. We

DURING chose misir wat (red lentil stew); gomen (collard greens); shiro (chickpea stew); cabbage; doro wat (chicken stew with spicy eggs—the boiled eggs added during the cooking tenderize the chicken); tibs bianco (mild spicy beef); and kitfo leb leb (spicy chopped meat with butter lightly sautéed so that it is practically rare).

The most important part of the platter was of course the traditional Ethiopian bread called injera, a sort of spongy crepe or pancake made from fermented teff (gluten-free grain from Ethiopia) that is essential to the Ethiopian meal. It has a tangy taste as it is left to ferment for many hours. Giovanni says that his injera is the only one in Rome that ferments for 60 hours. I was told by a young Ethiopian Italian woman that her mother buys her bread always from this restaurant. The injera is laid out completely covering the platter—with extra served in a basket.

According to our host, you can’t ever have too much injera. The selected stews and vegetables were laid out topping the injera in a circle. Giovanni instructed us to start clockwise. We dutifully tore off large portions from the edges of the injera and then scooped up the stew of choice, and we laughed as we tried not to get in each other’s way, as we almost automatically went against Giovanni’s strict instructions about eating clockwise. He just shook his head and smiled. I must say that since the injera was our “utensil” of choice eating bread was essential, but also super filling.

We discovered that the best portion of the injera was beneath the stew as the sauces soaked into the bread. It was a marvelous meal and the flavors were extraordinarily different and pleasing. I asked Giovanni what was the secret, and he smiled and proudly said, “Roba d’Africa” or “It’s African.” That was always his answer when I would approve a dish, as if to say the best of everything comes from Africa. He also suggested the boys try the Ethiopian beer, St. George, making the entire experience even more authentic.

One of the lessons I learned was to be careful of how much you order as Giovanni frowned on us for not being able to eat everything in that one dish.

It was a big cultural faux pas, but he still

Ristorante Africano - Enqutatash Viale della Stazione Prenestina, 55/57 Rome Tel. +39 06 273767 www.enqutatash.it

brought us pineapple chunks to clean our palates, offered us glasses of Ethiopian grappa—perhaps a remnant of Italian colonialism, and huge chunks of halawa - sesame and pistachio. Then at the end was the most important—coffee. I was lucky to have attended an Ethiopian coffee demonstration in New York last year so it wasn’t a complete surprise. The boys were very impressed, and were surprised to enjoy the coffee’s flavor. Giovanni said they roasted the coffee with cloves, to give a special, I would say sensual, flavor to the roast. Coffee is not just poured out to you, and it is not just ground coffee beans.

Ethiopian coffee is a real experience, a ceremony that makes me think of the Japanese tea ceremony, which can take hours. Of course in a restaurant it isn’t possible, but the experience begins with a woman, usually young, dressed in her traditional robes who roasts green beans over a flame. Eventually the beans are ground and the coffee is made but it takes a long time as the making of coffee, like the drinking of it must be savored.

In Ethiopia, it is a communal and social experience. It’s a time to talk with family, friends, and neighbors. We were served our coffee in a special pot and incense

accompanied the coffee.

One of my nephews said that for a young Italian it was an eye opening and mouthwatering experience. It was a way of learning about another culture and history that seemed to not have any connection with Italy. It made my nephews curious to know more about these connections and their common history that while not forgotten, was overlooked. I really enjoyed this culinary adventure in Rome and it was a wonderful way to reflect on the history of these two diverse countries and to wonder even more about the elements that bind them and divide them. It made me think about Italy in a different way, and took me out of my comfort zone. In Rome, I was able to have a meal that had nothing to do with Italian culture. I’m excited about the idea of experimenting in my own kitchen with the spices and flavors unique to the Ethiopian kitchen. I also really look forward to returning to this restaurant on my next trip to Rome, taking more Italians with me and learning more about this complex and unique food and culture. I am now also curious about seeking out other hidden or overlooked cuisines in my beloved Italy.

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Marisa Hall on Herbalism and Self-Care During Quarantine WORDS BY MARTINE THOMPSON PHOTOGRAPHY BY JUSTIN J. WEE Before the pandemic, I would spend time with friends or go into spaces where I could be in physical community with folks and balance that alongside some personal self-care. Like my very intimate relationship that I have with plants which is personal and kind of my own practice.

I view herbalism as something that can be a really powerful tool alongside other things. There’s a lot of understanding that I got from my grandmother, who was able to keep a lot of this knowledge, but who also had a lot of shame around it because, for her, it was like an indicator of having grown up in poverty and not having all of the access to doctors and hospitals, and to all of the things that would indicate colonially what is deemed valuable. So, when she moved from the rural South to California, it was something that she didn’t talk about. It was something that my grandfather was like, don’t talk about that.

We live in California now.

When I’d get sick as a child, I went to my grandmother’s house. She was my babysitter essentially. And she would have me go gather fresh thyme from her garden and oregano, and pick some figs from her fig tree in the backyard while she used herbs that I picked to make soup for me. I was also out getting sun and that was really nourishing for me. The whole experience was the medicine.

As an adult, when I moved to the East Coast and talked to my mom about my grandmother’s soup recipe, it was so weird because I was like, what? That’s all that was in it? It’s potato soup. And it’s basically just potatoes and onion and water and maybe a little bit of chicken stock, if you have it. And a bunch of herbs, fresh, raw garlic, just boiled down until it basically is a creamy soup. I was so little that I wasn’t really that inquisitive. I was like, I just trust that it’s going to be the best and I’m

going to feel so much better. It was just a super simple potato soup with white Yukon potatoes, nothing fancy at all.

Food is medicine — it’s the first place I learned about herbs and I think that’s so powerful. A lesson that I’ve learned from working with plants has been that the intimate and the precious and abundant moments are meant to be shared. And that has been really beautiful. For a long time, I would associate something being intimate and precious as something that I needed to keep to myself.

I don’t ever want to give the impression that any one thing is the be-all and end-all of a healing journey. I don’t think that it’s like, oh, you’re experiencing this, do this type of class or lean on this type of herb.

It’s really about creating an ecosystem for yourself that you can fit in, live in, hangout in, to show up in ways that feel true and sustainable on a daily basis.

And that really, of course, will vary by way of whatever’s happening, but having a support system, having a network of people and tools and systems that you can lean on for different things is really key. So, I have the group chat that I am in for certain types of moments, whether that’s the one where we just send each other the wildest, most chaotic TikToks we can find, or the one where we talk about where we’re at with certain really tender journeys that we’re on. I go to therapy and my therapist is an earth sign as well. I try to not spend too much time scrolling on the Internet while still staying informed about all the fuckery that’s happening.

Being outside without having anything to do has also been really helpful for me.

If I can just walk out of my door and go sit on my stoop or in the park, or go to the beach or whatever is accessible, whatever outdoor space is accessible, just sitting and breathing the air and taking a minute

without devices has been really precious, and then spending time with people that I love. I’m also a certified yoga instructor and so I have kind of a base knowledge.

That’s really helpful in moments where I just need to do something really quick or don’t feel like I have the bandwidth to do a whole zoom class or just don’t want to be in front of a screen. I also have a really incredible yoga community in Brooklyn where I did my training. I’ve signed up for lots of virtual classes through my home studio, Sacred Brooklyn, and I’m engaging in that way.

For queer folk in particular, nightlife has been a social aspect that I think a lot of us are really missing —just being in that community and being able to go out and see your friends, and dance with your friends, and not have to talk or process in ways that feel so heavy, but being able to kind of just release and know that everyone knows the same thing. And having an experience that is understood without having to speak it. In terms of the physicality of things, finding outlets for that is hard. And so much of what that’s been replaced with is having to just have conversations.

I think we’re all taking our own actions to get closer to somewhere that feels okay and feels livable. As my wonderful, beautiful friends, Kimberly [Drew] and Jenna [Wortham] have said, there are Black people in the future and there is Black life and joy and rest and monotony.

We deserve to just be bored. And so I think that’s what we’re really striving toward. It’s like, if you could have just a mundane as fuck day where you just watch TV or color, do that. I think being able to do that without guilt, doing something that feels good and useful as long as you’re not causing harm, can be really, really generative and healing.

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N’Gina Guyton and Her Farm

COURTESY OF N’GINA GUYTON

WORDS AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY DANA GRAY N’Gina Guyton is an artist dressed up as a boss. She owns South, one of Sacramento’s most beloved restaurants, as well as The Quinn, a clothing store, and The Good Saint, an event space. I took a trip to visit N’Gina at the site of her newest project, Of Soil and Water Farm, just outside of the city.

When I write that South is beloved, I am not being hyperbolic. Since its opening in 2014, there have been lines of locals waiting patiently for N’Gina’s family recipes: fried catfish and chicken, kale so tender you want to write it a love song, and cornbread, as well as banana pudding parfait and fried green tomatoes.

It’s hard to imagine the food scene in Sacramento before South.

When I arrive at Of Soil and Water Farm, N’Gina is wearing a t-shirt, teeny tiny shorts, tall rubber boots, and freshly cropped, bleached hair. We walk the 2.6-acre farm bordered by the lush riparian habitat along the Sacramento River and N’Gina shows me rows of tomatoes, basil, leeks, and okra, followed by rows of watermelon, romaine lettuce, Nasturtium, green onions, cucumbers, and Blue Lake green beans.

There are collard greens, marigolds, and corn next to new irrigation gently watering down cilantro, chard, kale, and spinach in the morning sun. N’Gina points to a portion of freshly tilled earth just beyond the crops and explains that the ground is being prepped for hot compost. Later this winter, they will be dropping in 20 fruit trees. And a larger plot of earth will soon be dedicated exclusively to kale, since it is a popular dish at South. A single pollinator garden on the periphery will be one of many as the farm matures, and the framing for a green house is up on a foundation of pea gravel, waiting for walls and a

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roof. N’Gina purchased the land almost two years ago. “To be honest, when I first bought the farm, I was intimidated and so I kept procrastinating getting started,” she shares.

“My primary goal with farming has been inspired by a need to supplement the kitchen at South. For two solid years, we were having serious issues with the produce we were getting in, because it wasn’t consistent. We were getting super woody okra; e coli warnings on kale recalls; green beans that snapped in half like sticks and when you chewed into them, they were super fibrous. It was bringing down the quality of what we were doing, and the customer doesn’t know that it’s the farmer.

The customer thinks it’s me, even though I am not growing it, I am serving it. So, it started to be reflected back in our bottom line, and I wanted more control and variety than we were able to get. I think farming in general across the United States is like, we’re only going to produce these top 20 things for consumption, and those are the top 20 things you see at the grocery store, and the top 20 things that you get when you go out to eat. And there’s like hundreds and thousands of different varietals of every single vegetable and fruit…and we eat a tiny narrow slice of it all, and I wanted variety without paying through the nose to get it.”

N’Gina recalls being on her grandfather’s farm in Tylertown, Mississippi as a child. “And that feeling it gave me to be outside, and the quiet, and having your space, and being able to watch things grow, and take these long walks down a dirt road. I just needed a little piece of that.”

Growing produce for the restaurant was not the only motivation behind acquiring the land. Sometimes a woman needs a room of her own, and sometimes she needs a whole damn farm. “Divorce is never easy, and this one was exceptionally hard. But I am glad everything happened the way that it did because this time around it forced some

healing for me. Spirit was like, ‘We are done playing games. You are now going to heal, and it’s not going to be a pretty ‘go-to-therapy’ kind of crying. This is going to be a dark night of the soul. Tear you down to your bones and build you back up…’ This healing process was excruciating, and I was running the restaurant, mothering kids, dealing with COVID, had a breast cancer scare…and this scare in the midst of this healing led to living more holistically.

Self-care was something I never, ever did for myself. I have that Virgo tendency to always do for other people, somebody else is first, I’ll be last, somebody will figure it out and give me something at some point in time—they will see how much I am giving, and they will give me something. And then you’re just waiting around, resenting everybody.” N’Gina explains that taking exquisite care of herself has paid off, and that being in alignment with herself has not come easily. Some folks fall away but falling away from yourself is so much lonelier. The new short hair is emblematic of the new freedom she feels.

“South is coping well in the pandemic, I’m not gonna lie. Everybody loves comfort food. I was scared in the very beginning to share that South was coping well, because I felt like I needed to be apologetic for my success. But we literally every day go in and ask ourselves, where can we zig where everybody zags? How can we set ourselves apart?”

“First, we stopped being really stuck up, which we were. Really stuck up, before the pandemic. I had this attitude that I’m only going to be serving fine dining Southern food, and we’re going to move the restaurant in that direction. I’m going to be Black Alice Waters. Fine dining wasn’t an authentic instinct; it was something that would get me into food magazines or get me the respect of other white/male chefs. Fine dining would help elevate the cuisine out and away from notions of ‘lazy Southern food.’ And then the pandemic hit.”

DURING

I ask N’Gina if they’d been planning on abandoning the bucket of chicken sold at South, and she says they were in fact looking to retire the witty and oh-so cheeky bucket of fried chicken. I tell her how I got one of those buckets of fried chicken for my husband for Valentine’s Day a few years ago, and it was a very romantic gesture for someone whose primary love language is food. She laughs. “The bucket was one of the things that we adjusted in response to the pandemic. We added different sizes, people are at home now and everyone is eating. And people need value, let them get a bucket and have leftovers for picnic chicken the next day. We just started thinking about the food people were eating at home instead of in our dining room… how do we re-create that family meal and package it so it’s easy and fun. If you’re already stressed about COVID, and working from home, the last thing you want to deal with is, ‘Now I gotta cook.’ So we just wanted to make it easy and affordable.

And then when the ABC’s [agencies like OSHA, etc.] said we could serve to-go alcohol, it was a wrap.”

N’Gina is a self-taught chef, and there are generations of women standing behind her in the kitchen. She started cooking at age 11, when her mother recruited her to cook for Thanksgiving. “My mom knocked on my bedroom door: ‘Get up. You’re cooking Thanksgiving with me.’ I was like, ‘what did you say Patricia?’”

“My mother was an excellent home cook. She brought out the family cookbook with all those handwritten recipes on the cards. Some of those recipes come from my great grandmother and great-great grandmother. Some of the recipes are a hundred years plus. That was my beginning as a necessity and not as a passion.”

“I went to UC Davis and totally screwed around, I was on academic probation and my dad was like, ‘You’re out.’ But my deal was, I could stay and live in Davis if I worked. That’s when I joined the Randy

Paragary family. I was part of the opening crew for Café Bernardo Davis, and this is where my passion for food started. I was serving, and when I started, I didn’t even know there was a difference between red and white wine. There was a lot of education that Paragary gave the staff, and that started a passion and curiosity around food. I finished my degree at CSU Sacramento in Fine Art.” “Southern food does get a bad rap for being unhealthy, but I think that it can be very healthy if I am using quality ingredients. Clean ingredients. Of Soil and Water Farm is a completely organic operation. Not one chemical. Clean water, clean soil. Not only do we cook with love, now we grow this food with love. And we hope that it resonates, and people can feel that energy in their body.”

An artist, dressed as a boss, with a side of organic peach cobbler so good it’ll make you hug somebody. I can’t wait to see what else she creates.

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WORDS BY AKUDO MEZ The initial warning news of a pandemic was enough to clear out aisles of pasta, beans, and other canned goods. When I would go to the grocery store, I still wanted to incorporate fresh vegetables that wouldn’t spoil quickly. Cabbage and cauliflower became regulars during the pandemic because they were able to last between my infrequent grocery visits.

Cabbage is a great vegetable to have on deck. It’s easy to prepare in many different ways and can usually last up to three weeks with proper storage. Another vegetable to keep on hand is cauliflower, it can last in the fridge for up to two weeks. Check out the recipes below for some tasty meals with these vegetables.

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DURING

When Your Mom is on the Frontline WORDS BY VONNIE WILLIAMS PHOTOGRAPHY BY KLANCY MILLER / MURAL BY M. TONY PERALTA

After what seemed like an endless stream of vibrating notifications wishing one of my brothers a happy birthday, my mom sends a text to our family group chat.

My uncle was dead.

He was our family’s favorite uncle, and though my mom may never admit it out loud, her favorite brother. The same uncle I planned on visiting this summer in London pre-COVID, and the same uncle who just spoke to my mom the night before his heart stopped in his sleep.

I was in disbelief. For my mom, who became a widow two months before, it was the crack in a foundation that was already weak. She barely had enough time to process what happened; as an essential worker, she was needed more than ever. She works in a place where those considered too old, too ornery, and too vulnerable come to live.

She cares for those who are considered burdens instead of blessings in society, those who’ve made the decision to unburden themselves away from families or families who decided to free themselves of their burden.

At the same time, I’m watching the fallout of the food world, its inequities finally unraveling like spools of thread. I read the stories of well-to-do restauranteurs complaining about business, while their staff, now essential workers, were forced to decide between their livelihoods and health. I saw that people were only seen as “essential” when they are in service to others who have the luxury of convenience and absolvement. For some people, essential workers are an abstraction, one that they entertain while exchanging pleasantries tinged with pity to someone working behind the register. But it’s my reality—and the reality of millions of other families. Essential workers give up more than their time and health for this country. Every decision, every action reverberates to families and communities.

I knew my mom needed some time off, but to take more than a day off meant a pay cut, which she couldn’t do. At the time, I had the financial means to give my mom a week’s worth of her wages. But I knew it wasn’t enough. The little advantage and privilege I had in being able to contribute financially was because of the sacrifices my parents made, taking pride in work most people would find beneath them. Growing up as a child of immigrants means that you see this dance of parents telling you anything is possible if you work hard, but seeing them waltz backward no matter how many backbreaking hours they work. Maybe you start to believe it too, that the sacrifices they made meant more than they ever imagined, that your degrees and promise of upward mobility could shield you from the shit they went through. Then you realize that you played yourself, that even a whiff of meritocracy or fairness you set your eyes on is a thinly veiled lie, and the weight of the world your parents once bore in their weary expressions soon becomes your own. And it makes you angry as hell.

I channeled my anger the only way I knew how, knowing that I couldn’t afford to give another week of paid wages, as much as I wanted to. Clapping at 7pm is cute, but I don’t know anyone who clapped their bills into oblivion. Instead, I got to work in the kitchen.

I made huge steam pans of spicy jollof rice, fragrant curry rice—any

kind of rice, really—hearty tomato-based stews, soups. Anything to help with the very real fact that my mom and family had to stay healthy, if only for the selfish reason that I needed her to exist, to continue to know that she mattered, even if the world saw her life as disposable, as we all dealt with the terrifying possibility that if my mom caught the virus she may not survive. Oh, and I can’t forget all the pasta I made. Lots of it. There were some greens and other vegetables because vitamins...and pan banging cookies. I made those at least once a week, the ripples an aftershock to the anger and worry that consumed me almost daily.

During these times, food wasn’t a salve or a panacea for solving racism or differences; it wasn’t bringing anyone closer or any of the things people say to make themselves feel better. It was just to unload

the weight of cooking; one less thing to worry about, and one more thing to be relieved about, especially when takeout seemed like a danger and a luxury. Now that most states have reopened and folks believe the worst is behind us (it’s not), essential workers are working as hard as ever, without any measurable protections, pay increases, or better workplaces.

A few months ago, my mom received a card in the mail from work.

It looked substantial, weighted with something heavier than soupy gratitude. We were all excited to see what it had inside.

She opened the envelope gingerly, stared at the card for a few seconds, and tossed it aside. “There’s no money,” she said, sucking her teeth softly. “They could’ve at least put a Dunkin’ Donuts card in there.”

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We Served Ourselves Second Helpings WORDS BY ERICA CARDWELL On March 9, 2019, we moved. Z and I saw over 20 listings – trudging up and down Ocean Avenue in the winter rain of this changing climate. We took shelter in corridors with potential neighbors, only to return to the apartment we lovingly painted. Our first home together. Living in this apartment was a brief tango with privileges that neither of us had ever known before— doorman, bike storage, dishwasher. Elevator. The building was a gentrification cocktail of affluent mostly white, ethnically mixed professionals, families with their first child, and elder Black and Muslim families who had owned their apartments for generations. And, the elevator became a cultural etiquette test – who would say hello first, who would commit to ignoring you while studying their mail, and who would remain remarkably unbothered to even look in your direction, even in front of their children.

We were moving to an apartment just ten minutes away to a building with none of the same amenities. But what the apartment lacked in luxury, it made up for in size. It was big enough to fit two of our old apartments inside of it – and energy: most of the tenants are Haitian, Panamanian and West Indian, folks who will hold the door, whose children say hello, and who, unsurprisingly, peer behind us for a man or a child. The super asked, what do you plan to do with the extra room, with one eye on the bedroom, putting the story together, that is where we both sleep.

March 9, 2019 was also my 37th birthday. Needless to say, a move on my birthday wasn’t purposeful. Z and I spent the day packing and making runs to the liquor store for hearty boxes that could fit our endless collection of books. Things reached slapstick proportions when, after a day of packing, I found myself at a birthday party for a dear friend. My voice rose into the birthday song as the candles lit fires in the pupils of my eyes. Z had been in the bathroom. When she returned, her eyes, ignited by the same flame, told me next year will be different, baby. The tone reeked of the bewildered funk of frustration and absurdity, silence and celebration, a troubling foreshadow of what was to come.

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DURING *** March 9, 2020, the city was on lockdown. The school where I teach announced that it would be going online until after spring break. Everyone was anticipating an alert from Mayor de Blasio enforcing stay at home orders like China and Italy with armed officers patrolling the streets and affidavits required to enter the subway.

I stood in front of an assortment of organic flours at the small natural foods shop around the corner from our new place. I was looking for teff flour.

I figured now was as good a time as any to attempt injera. What I was doing was panicking—knuckles wrapped tightly around the disinfected handle of the cart. Back and forth, heel to toe, I rotated between glimpses of the package labels and alerts on my phone. Every few minutes, a friend’s texts flashed crowdfunding links for PPE across the screen. The package of teff landed in my cart. Our cupboards were stocked – I had been making small runs for coffee beans, tetra-packs of almond milk, rice, beans, nuts and other items with a lengthy shelflife. Yet and still, I waddled home with an embarrassment of groceries in bloated bags. An elder from my new building exited as I approached. Like mine, her turquoise mask rested underneath her nose. I remember putting my mask on for the first time, instinctively tugging it down below my nose. Before I left the house, Z scolded me to situate it correctly with a rightful grimace. Now, I mimed awkward pleasantries with this woman, arching our brows high into pants of “thank you” and “yes, dear.” The bag pulled hard at my already tight neck, slouching me. Dried chickpeas clanged like beads against a glass pint of organic juice. Her eyes were wet as she held the door for me. With my shoulder, I shoved my mask further up my face.

That night I returned to my desk. I believe my plan was to envision a writing schedule for all the “time” I now had available. At the top of the page, I wrote “when the milk runs out” and proceeded to scribble eggs, tahini, mushrooms, cilantro along the edge of the page.

Around a week later, it was announced that classes would remain online until the end of the semester. De Blasio would save his curfews for the spring of uprisings; and I would face the work of transferring three syllabi into something meaningful online. *** The first meal I prepared for my wife’s mother was a pot of chili. I like mixing black and red beans, with a can of crushed instead of diced tomatoes, chopped yellow pepper if it’s available, but green will do. It was meant to be stored and frozen for her while she waited by her youngest daughter’s bedside after a terrible bike accident. The storage container read “Maribel chili” and the date was November 2013. As I stirred the pot, her eyes studied me, the way I measured in the palm of my hand, the way I worked from instinct. Perhaps she wondered, where did she learn these things. Those same eyes, filled with compassion, when I shared with her that my mother had been dead for many years. That Christmas, she gifted me a large nonstick frying pan and a book called Filipino Women Writers. When I opened the box, she told me, “This will help you understand my daughter.” I recall her scurrying away then, to load the dishwasher or tend to dinner or some other thing. Less than two years later, her life taken, stricken suddenly by ALS- a sinister disease which attacks the nervous system, disintegrated a once active life.

I would prepare meals in her kitchenmeals that she would never eat— the only ritual that would calm my frantic nerves as she lay dying in the next room.

My entire adult life has been without my mother. It is one of the shadows looming large behind me, marking my steps, my true age. In the initial years without her, the anniversary of her death ached and folded my body into a whiplash of mourning. When I grew tired of this, I concocted a means of disrupting grief by hosting a fish fry in her honor. The idea arrived in a whisper. The day hearkened to the Biblical parable of the five loaves and two fish, where everyone is fed and the food never ran out, even when I swore that I only spent 30 dollars, even when

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DURING my hand cramped from leaning over the fryer. My recipe was a mixture of David Tanis’s herb-y cornmeal mixture (be sure to dredge the fish in the whisked egg more than once and serve it with dijon mustard and chowchow if you can’t get your hands on harissa for his piquant mayo) and napa slaw with toasted caraway from an old copy of Southern Living. The gathering was always an evening of loving on one another, sharing poetry, and leaving me be. On one of the more haunted nights, several bottles of wine were haphazardly stacked at the end of a card table. When the table gave way, nearly a dozen bottles shattered onto the crusty linoleum, casting a river of merlot and cabernet across the living room and down the hall. I was hiding in my bedroom, smoking a cigarette, in my usual retreat. When I ran in to check on the noise, I saw my friends, a glorified gaggle of young lesbians, clamoring after the wine with towels and napkins, writing a new story.

When our mothers died, the world ended. How painful it is to wake up alive, day after day, and desire the smell of fried corn bread or chicken stewing in adobo, made by our mothers?

Hunger would take on new meaning, an insatiable chasm impregnating us with organs meant for another life. What to make of grief when it becomes a buzz word? When everyone seems to know what you know about the end of the world? Nothing else will suffice for the uncertainty of moving forward, the past infecting the present, a new thing to abandon. As quarantine raged on and taking out the garbage truly became a pastime, entering our building’s hallway enlivened us with the smell of memory – empanadas and palettes from next door, lentil dhal from one floor below, ackee and salt fish from the apartment directly across from us. These smells inspired.

We knew the people in our building had never stopped working, living – being essential. I wanted to join them, to also proclaim, we’re awake, we’re alive!

So, Z and I took on the work of selfpreservation. I could say that I learned to cook from my mother, tasked with the

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box of Jiffy cornbread or chopping the onions for a pot of spaghetti sauce. My mother did not have her own cookbook – her recipes are found in the margins of newspaper clippings, on the back of envelopes, or on Post-it notes inside of other cookbooks. It is also true that I learned to cook while I worked as a waitress in my twenties. There, I tasted the peppery punch of arugula for the first time or watched a raw egg wade into a silky poach. David Tanis’s The Heart of the Artichoke was the first “fancy” cookbook that I came to own. With a breathy thud, the book collapsed onto the countertop, falling open to his glamorous roast chicken adorned with charred lemon slices and blackened herbs.

When my workload lightened and I had the time to think, I would choose a recipe with several steps to occupy my mind. Mushroom ragout with homemade vegetable broth; mujadara with French lentils and plenty of crispy shallots; vegetable korma, a version made with cauliflower, handfuls of soft cashews, and extra ginger. In one of many divine cookbook gifts, a copy of Persiana by Sabrina Ghayour arrived. Z sat in the foyer for nearly an hour, running her fingers across the vibrant pages, calling out memories of her Iranian father. She got to work on the buttery comfort of bhaghali gatoh and tacheen, or what I consider to be “the gift that keeps on giving.” We continued to eat this delicious bake of yogurt, shredded chicken, zereshk, and rice for dinner, as an omelet for brunch, and late supper. Z’s go-to cookbook was a spiral-bound book of photocopied recipes her mother cobbled together to assist in the beginning of her life away from home. From it, she prepared us a Thai fish recipe with red peppers, chili garlic sauce, ginger and an impressive Filipino sweet and sour fish soup called sinigang. Advice: stock up on spices.

Every few weeks, I found myself stuck between the countertops, ensnared by sorrow, forgetting what I was intent on doing next. Whenever lost, I would whirl around to a sink full of dishes and get to work. How does one interfere with grief,

circulating in your veins, waiting to unfurl the tuck of your chin, the grit of your teeth? On those days, the absence formed a mouth, recounting the questions that will always be there. Why did you say that?

Did you ever apologize? How could you let them hurt you? And on good days, I sat at our table and allowed the tears to crackle in my throat. Or I quieted myself in a chair near her, watchful as we both trembled through the absence.

The grocery list was a master plan which I tended to with the commitment of a diary. Once I aimed to make everything extend into more than one meal, we coasted: corn tortillas as tacos (tofu, veggies, chickpea, etc.) and chilaquiles; David Tanis’s roast chicken but with a touch of honey, made for delicious chicken salad sandwiches and fried rice later that week. Leftover herbs put to good use in a mixed herb pesto with whatever nuts were left. The remainder of a can of diced tomatoes became a creamy soup with coconut milk and a squeeze of lime, and a friend’s recipe for café de olla infusing flavor to Café Bustelo with ground ginger when there were no more oranges or their rinds. Another tip: make use of frozen vegetables. Z perfected her coconut saag with tofu paneer with bags of frozen spinach, leaving me purring with lactose intolerant gratitude.

Other cookbook regulars: Julia Turshen’s kale pepita salad from Now and Again energized our table at least three times a week for several weeks; Edna Lewis’s cornbread (if you’re like me and can’t handle buttermilk, make it with almond milk but don’t scrimp on the cow’s butter) paired with black eyed peas; Ottolenghi’s turkey zucchini “burgers”; Bryant Terry’s collard greens made with ginger and citrus; tubs of granola, several olive oil cakes, and oatmeal cardamom cookies. *** As I write this, it is August 2020. The speed of our lives may have slowed, but procrastination remains. The apartment still needs a few finishing touches. The 200-piece puzzle gathered a scummy film of neglect on our table for months.

Inches away, we served ourselves second helpings.

This questionnaire has three influences—Marcel Proust, Audre Lorde, and the pandemic. There are a few questions that are a twist on Proust’s questionnaire, which came from an old parlor game that’s meant to unveil one’s true self. The question “what do you need to say” is from the Audre Lorde “Questionnaire to Oneself.” The others focus on food, beverages, cooking and the pandemic. The goal of this questionnaire is to check in with Black women and femmes in food and wine and to get to know the person, their food, favorite beverages and frame of mind in this moment. For the first issue, we asked Zoe Adjonyoh, Mashama Bailey, and Thérèse Nelson to respond to the questionnaire.

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Zoe Adjonyoh

pg 72

Mashama Bailey

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Thérèse Nelson

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QUESTIONNAIRE

ZOE ADJONYOH What is your state of mind right now? It’s the first time in 15 years of visiting New York City that I haven’t run amok in its restaurants, cafés, bars and parks and felt alive in its comfortable grind, hustle and bustle. There is life—the awnings on the roads allowing for outside dining, a less busy stream of yellow taxis do in fact still stream—somewhat. The few ant like people on the streets below my window signal life keeps moving. So, there is hope. There is also fear, joy, optimism and pessimism. I am open and closed. I am lonely and suffocated. I am driven and unfocused. I am in flow and I am in stasis. I am loved and I am loving. I am striving. I am thriving. I am unravelling. I am alive and I am here and right now I’m okay with all of that.

PHOTO BY LATEEF OKUNNO

What is your idea of bliss? I have been dreaming of a working farm—perhaps upstate or in Pennsylvania—building my dream home. I look out from my office over a lake. I’m holding a cup of freshly made stove top black coffee. I do not smoke. I see a teal lake a stone’s throw away and off the small cobbled totters pier my brother in law is fishing—our children clambering around him in eagerness to learn the magic of the fly. To my left and far across, I see fields and fields of crops growing, waving up to the sun— then the solar paneled greenhouses stretching for half a mile growing my herbs and spices from Africa. Below, by the weeping willow is a bevy of friends and family roaring with laughter over the fire pit while the bbq licks flames over the vegetables we grew and the meat we sustainably farmed. I have spent two hours writing and two hours reading after milking goats and cows and cleaning stables. My wife envelopes me with her love hug with our smallest child strapped to her back. That is it right there. Bliss. Until then—every present moment I’m trying toil with bliss.

What are you afraid of? I’m scared of heights that require

to look over the edge with no safety net below. Yet I do it every day, right? I’m an entrepreneur—pivoting every two days at this point—this is a fear I live with easily every day.

I’m scared of success. I’m scared of failure. I’m still trying to work it out— what am I afraid of? I know I’m afraid of something I haven’t quite got to grips with it. To know our base fear is to find freedom because once we have it in front of us we can examine it, get to know it, question it.

I’m leaning into the idea that I’m terrified of living a life that never made a substantial impact in the service of humanity or worse that I do and no one notices.

Who are some of your role models in the culinary world? Bryant [Terry] has been an inspiration ever since I came across Afro Vegan— the first time I saw a cookbook reflecting some of me and my culture back at me in a way I understood through food. I am privileged to be friends with Alexander Smalls—his story is one long song of joy and triumph over pain and adversity. Preeti Mistry, Reem Assil, Julia Turshen, Samin Nosrat, Yasmin Khan, Tiffani Rozier, Sicily Sierra, Mavis-Jay for the work they do for their communities. Nigella Lawson for being an absolute babe always. Sisi Yemmie—for her grace in her success. Thérèse Nelson and Dr. Jessica B. Harris—for their intellectual and historical mining of the culture to give us an education we wouldn’t get elsewhere. Shola Olunloyo—I love this man— his crazy beautiful mad genius when it comes to the science of cooking is much underestimated and valued.

What’s your greatest food extravagance? Fine dining.

I don’t enjoy the site nature of these spaces and find them very overpriced with little value in most cases. There is the rare exception though—eating at a Michelin star restaurant is a very rare extravagance indeed but, that would be my greatest.

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QUESTIONNAIRE What are your favorite ingredients? Everything I sell in my shop. Start with what you love right? A shortlist would be: Grains of Selim—there is nothing as special and beautiful as this wrinkly caterpillar looking spice. Alligator Pepper—also known as “grains of praised”—my go-to instead of ordinary course ground black pepper. Dawadawa—that deep savory protein rich umami from the stinky fermented closet bean— has become a constant flavor enhancer and it’s great in replacement for meat or fish in vegan recipes. Baobab—I could sing about it. Moringa—it’s the miracle tree.

What is a dish that you’re eating or cooking regularly these days? Chicken Soup for the soul— hella chicken soup. From a variety of cultures whether it be Nkarra Light Soup from Ghana, Jewish matzah ball soup from my mother in law, spicy chicken ramen—all the soups!

What’s a journey you’re looking forward to taking?

One of the hardest parts of this pandemic and I know this screams privilege but it is what it is— travel! I miss being able to travel so much! As soon as this nonsense is over I’m going to Zambia to be a judge on Masterchef Zambia. I’m going to take my whole family to Accra and I’m going to take Sara to Jamaica or Bali and get beached up, eating only fish and vegetables for three weeks solid.

What is your greatest regret in your career? Not staying on my own track— folding into myself for an industry that was never equipped or intended to hold me well or allow me to thrive.

What or who is the greatest love of your life? My wife, Sara Held.

What are you most proud of? My niece, Amerie.

What is your favorite thing to eat? Groundnut Soup (with freshly pounded Fufu, flowery boiled yam and over ripe plantain).

What is the kindest thing someone did for you during quarantine? A guy called Jamie Sinclair contacted me out of the blue to help me when I started the crowdfunder campaign to launch a community kitchen when the pandemic hit the UK. The kindness of strangers will always blow me away— I’ve since developed a working relationship and friendship with him.

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businesses died a death due to COVID-19.

How have you taken care of your mental health during the pandemic? Community, connection, service and a very well developed and curated mindfulness and mediation practice every morning.

What are two changes you would like to see in the food industry? Systemic leadership changes at board level and equivalent of all major food brands, institutions, publications and associations. Now. Posthaste please.

What do you need to say right now? Breathe deeply and often. Do you! Do you with intention and mindful focus.

Embrace all of your shit—good and bad, own it, celebrate it and show up for yourself by being your authentic self every single damn day. I’m trying to live in the vibe of balancing my heart with a feather on the other side of the scale. I think Jay Shetty gave me that beautiful image. It is not easy but I strive.

How has 2020 radicalized you? I think radicalized may be overstating it—energized is perhaps more appropriate— 2020 has energized the hell out of me— moved me deeper into my purpose and desire to serve whilst stepping into my power in every direction I can.

What is a show or film you enjoyed watching during 2020? I don’t know how I missed it first time around but Black-ish and Mixed-ish gave me life during lockdown.

Mixedish was particularly amazing—literally the first time I saw part of myself and my childhood reflected on-screen since the adaption of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. Also The 40-Year Old Version – UH-MAZING. What did you enjoy reading in 2020? Audre Lorde— especially, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House; Kwame Onwuachi’s Notes From a Young Black Chef; and Me and White Supremacy by Layla F. Saad.

Which organizations or individuals or philosophies did you amplify or support in 2020? Any platform promoting community and focused on representing Black and nonwhite people in the food industry—Black Book, Black Food Folks, Afros and Knives, Alicia Kennedy, For the Culture Food Magazine, Afro Punk, Tastemakers Africa, Dine Diaspora.

What’s the kindest thing you did for yourself during quarantine? Accepted help.

Do you eat dessert? If so, what? Sticky toffee pudding or anything with chocolate.

What’s the kindest thing you did for someone else during quarantine? Managing to place my team into alternative employment elsewhere when our catering

What are you most looking forward to? Sara and I taking a honeymoon after nearly three years of marriage— we still haven’t had a honeymoon!

The Black Repast WORDS BY MONICA O’CONNELL

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ike all Black moms, mine, Jacky Woods, contained multitudes deep and honed.

Consensus recognized her insatiable love of reading, acquisition of new crafting skills, and fierce loyalty in friendship, as well as a life-long commitment to education. She was everyone’s favorite teacher. Coming up, it seemed like she was always getting approached by former students. Kids who now towered over her 5’3” frame, would hug her with such enthusiasm: “Hey, Miz Woods! Hey, Miz Woods!” They’d thank her for this or that. Their cheeks would warm with blush as my mom complimented them, simultaneously piecing together which child this was, now “all grown.” Miz Woods was razor sharp, a big laugher, intolerant of nonsense or sentimentality. She was a fan of black and white Westerns and mediocre police procedurals. Especially since taking a late-in-life professional pivot towards food, I think a lot about my mom’s food-related care work. She was a good and thoughtful cook but entertaining was surely among her deepest talents. She knew how to make people feel welcome. She is why even though baking is technically my chosen profession, I understand my overarching project as one revolving around hospitality. As, I think, for all Black moms, hospitality operated for mine in deep registers of care taking.

Registers deeper than those that drive either the predictable reciprocity of dinner party logic or the transactionality of our hospitality industries. The cake or the curated dinner menu, the pot of beans on the back burner were in service. Not to say there wasn’t also deep satisfaction derived from learning a new skill, recipe, or technique. Or that we didn’t relish the aesthetic joy of setting a beautiful tablescape. It was just that her “why” always led beyond instrumentality with open arms towards community. The dishes we made were a tending to.

My mother was exceptional but not unique.

Her own practice had its trademarks, tells, and touches but the orientation was one shared with Black women everywhere. Around Christmas, for an upcoming birthday or house party, if a neighbor was ailing or had just moved in, mom and I would sit at the kitchen

table and scan her cookbooks in search of the perfect projects or menu items. I loved the shared glow and expectation of this part of the process. Would this year’s gifts be jams or pulled candies? Which cookies would make Miss Carol’s hospital stay a bit more tolerable?

Will this casserole freeze well? Mine was a working mom and a product of a certain time and suburb, so the most referenced volumes inevitably included Better Homes and Gardens, Betty Crocker, spiral bound church and club cookbooks, and Southern Living Annuals.

When these failed to inspire, we turned to her tiny paperback copy of Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine. Written by the Darden sisters, Norma Jean and Carole, this Black classic was one of my favorites then and still is.

Surrounded by bucolic scenery and dressed in calico aprons and eyelet, the Dardens held baskets of garden-fresh produce for the cover shot. They affirmed a kind of direct connection to soil that intrigued my younger self. My dad had spoken of the farming in his past, but reluctantly. I had read Laura Ingalls Wilder and had white friends at school with grandparents who had farms (with horses!).

The Dardens though, pulled me gently by the hand into a frame of possibility that seemed somehow both more wild and more grounded than my own after school specialdrenched, latch-key existence could fathom.

The cookbook, which was originally published in 1978, takes its structure from the family tree. Recipes cohere around the relatives who favored them. My mom and I both loved the strong storytelling element and the way form followed and honored the sprawling path of Black family life. The celebrations, losses, grief, achievements, new births and so on were affirmative in their everyday-ness.

Spoonbread helped me understand that each time mom and I made something in the spirit of tending to our families and communities, we were also planting seeds of tradition that would grow trees strong enough to weather storms. My mom died April 8, 2020, after an eight-year battle with breast cancer, in the midst of the COVID-19 global pandemic. At that time, before the coddled majority grew tired of protecting one another and stopped minding science and common sense, most

states were allowing groups of no more than 10 to gather even for funerals, weddings and other major events. My husband and brother are among the immunocompromised in our family, so it seemed safest to hold a virtual service. We streamed from shuttered homes in separate states that which should have been experienced in the knowing intimacy of the collective. We sheltered, and grieved in place, instead of in each other’s arms and kitchens.

No shift in circumstance would bring my mom back or make me miss her less but it took me a minute to understand why my grieving felt so stricken and, well, sad. Weeks later, going through her old cookbooks, I stopped to spend a while with Spoonbread. In addition to those organized around relatives, there are four chapters organized instead, around sites of hospitable sociality: “Holiday Time with the Winner Sisters” and “New Years Day Dinner” (both of which include complete, occasion-specific menus), “On the Road,” recipes received from friends met and visited while traveling, and a section titled, simply, “Funerals,” which suggests an assortment of cakes and pies to take to a bereaved family.

As a cake baker, these are the recipes I sniff out first in any cookbook I pick up. That their placement in this book so thoughtfully reflects the logic of our sociality makes me love Spoonbread even more. The remarks at the beginning of this section remind us that “The custom of caring for the bereaved goes back to ancient Africa where the family of the deceased was given not only food but items of value, including clothing and household items, by the entire community in an effort to offset the loss in a practical manner. In the antebellum South, churches, fraternal orders, and burial societies took over in a similar fashion and the tradition manifests today in our wake and repast traditions.” The repast (or repass) typically, technically, describes the meal following a burial service. I think of the practice of the Black Repast more expansively and include food-related and food-adjacent care associated with practices around dropping in and vigil keeping as well as the actual post funeral reception.

I think of the Black Repast as one element of what visual artist Kerry James Marshall would

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call a “counterarchive” to the transactional and hierarchical logic of mainstream hospitality. The books about processing grief remind us that it’s not the if (we will) or the when (each timeline is different) but the how of grieving that matters.

For me and mine, the best and healthiest grieving is accomplished in community. Writer Claudia Rankine has said that the condition of Black life is one of mourning. Grieving in the age of COVID and the context of Black Lives Matter brings what we already knew about the indivisibility of the personal and political into stiletto-sharp relief. The weight of the moment has distorted my own fraught grieving process. Where a soft, bereft sadness may have led, I’m instead managing a white-hot rage. I am angry that, like too many of us during this public health fiasco, my mother died alone in a hospital, visitors banned, instead of at home with her family bedside. I am angry that I couldn’t bake for her one last time; something that addressed that killer sweet tooth of hers. I am angry that her life—so full of laughter, placemaking, passion for teaching and learning, joy and love—had, by necessity and precaution, to be memorialized through the unworthy filter of Facebook Live. I am also managing mournful surprise as I realize the extent of loss and isolation I felt without the ability to engage in one of the most meaningful sites of Black hospitality —the repast. From Spoonbread: “Friends and neighbors prepare and donate food to the grieving so they don’t have the burden of cooking for themselves or for the many guests who will be visiting. Those closest take up vigil to clean and prepare for visitors and receive the gifts of food.” Even for households in which a more formal protocol would normally take precedent, the Black Repast manifests in the spirit of visitation not invitation.

My mom was a champion of the visitation ethos. She cultivated it wherever she found herself. Her neighborhood was close-knit and familiar due to her efforts and those of the other women in her community.

I have no way of knowing for certain, but I’d like to think that in a parallel world, one in which COVID remained dormant, I would have been with my mom when she died. After the fact, I’d have stayed at her house in the lilac guest bedroom where I always stayed.

She used to place little baskets of snacks, Nabs maybe, bottled water and prayer cards on the bedside stands for visitors. Now there are boxes of clothes stacked in the corner for Goodwill. Clothes her cancerfighting body gradually grew too small for. I’d have felt her presence there and been able to

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bear witness with her bereaved husband. A wonderful spouse, he care took faithfully and patiently bore the sharp brunt of her projected frustration, fear, and fight. My brother and I would have helped him shuffle papers and organize. We’d find a photo or a note tucked away forgotten in a book, or smell her favorite J’Adore perfume still lingering on one of her sweaters. Maybe one of us would break down at these moments—the realization of loss taking our breath away anew. But we’d also hold space for each other. We’d keep those awful shows she watched on repeat during her long bed stays on in the background for comfort: Elementary, Monk, Wagon Train, Blue Bloods. The dropping in would likely have begun before we felt entirely ready for it. It would have started as a trickle. A single neighbor: “Just wanted to check on y’all on my way out. You need anything from the store?”

As word spread and at its height, a seeming steady stream of neighbors, friends and family members would be by to check in. Invariably, they’d bring food. Spaghetti, ribs, someone’s suspect potato salad. Maybe just a greasy sack of Bojangles chicken biscuits. And of course the cakes. A neighbor’s poundcake, Fran’s famous coconut. We wouldn’t wonder where we’d get the energy to fix something.

There would simply always be something out or close at hand when we only wanted a bite.

The dishes (the cakes!) are central to but not the entirety of this hospitality. Someone would stay to do the dishes, humming “When We All Get To Heaven” just under their breath. Someone else might wash and fold laundry. Errands would be run, couch pillows fluffed, the vase water changed and flower stems recut.

Someone might think to gently place a blanket over the shoulders of my stepdad, asleep in his EZ chair.

Those keeping vigil with you (often selfelected) make sure your home is welcoming and presentable for the next group of visitors but more importantly that it is a comfort and not a source of added stress for you. I’m a devoted introvert. By now I’d be wishing for a few moments to just slump in a chair and stare vacantly, not having to talk to anyone.

I’d be trying silently to will that one neighbor to stop wiping every counter surface after me and stop laughing at their own remembrances and to go sit down somewhere too. I know I’d be so grateful when the last went home and I had a moment’s peace with my own thoughts.

But I would feel nourished, full, and taken care of. Held. After the funeral would come the repast proper. Anthropologist Haile Eshe Cole, writes about the Black Repast in ways

that resonate with familiarity. At our repast, like hers, chocolate-skinned girls with “braids, plaits, and brightly colored hair bows” would run around the open boundaries of the dining hall, laughing in their Sunday best. Adults would be laughing too, smiling through tears, and catching up with each other. “How are things? Where is so and so?” “How old are the kids now?” And then, piled high on that “line of long rectangular white tables” was the food: fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, sweet potato pie and of course, the cakes. Cole notes: “In the space of the repast, the realities and inevitability of death, as well as the hope and determination to live, radically co-exist. It is also in this ritualized space where Black love is most pronounced.” The Repast describes relational processes, which Black Studies scholar Christina Sharpe would suggest occur in the register of the intramural, or among us.

And the ordinary, everyday acts of hospitality the Repast makes space for cannot be reduced to the transactional. To borrow from Sharpe, it is through the process of the Black Repast (thought broadly) that we think about the dead and about our relation to them and to each other. It is ritual through which we enact grief, and what Toni Morrison called (re)memory.

It is a space that might acknowledge the condition of Black life as one of mourning—but also one that recognizes mourning as a form of tactical acknowledgement itself. A method that Claudia Rankine reminds us has pushed movements forward from Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter.

Within the space of the Black Repast, we acknowledge each other, we acknowledge that we are still here, and we acknowledge that it is the tending to that makes it so. The Black Repast though, is more than mourning. It is also nourishment, support, shelter, and care taking in the ways of what I call deep hospitality.

Black women, as the conveners, the space makers, the community caretakers, connectors, and, importantly, the preparers and servers of food are the carriers of this healing tradition.

I’ve seen the articles and memes that ask “What Do You Miss Most About Life Before COVID?” I miss my mom. Everyday. And because of physical distancing requirements, I didn’t even get a slice of Fran’s coconut cake.

But in its absence I am reminded that the Black Repast is a path through the rubble. It models the kind of mutuality and simultaneous benefit that purely transactional models of hospitality inevitably fail to deliver. Scrambling industries might take a cue: solutions are often more about (re)membering and acknowledging than innovating.

DURING

World Mended but Not Broken WORDS BY ADJOA KITTOE I thought I had it figured out: get a job in the food and beverage industry, maintain a 4.0 GPA at culinary school, get placed at an externship, get hired at said externship, graduate, and become a top culinarian. In a perfect world, my plans were fail-proof. Although I thought of plan B through Z, I always banked on Plan A. March 2020 changed all of the things I thought were set for me.

It was towards the end of my shift. Usually, the day goes by quickly as a prep cook. At the time, I worked as a staff member at a women-focused co-working space. It was my first job on the line. I had entered the industry as self-taught, cooking, wanting to sharpen my culinary skills with technique and discipline. Although my position wasn’t as fast-paced as some fast-casual experiences, I enjoyed the little heat I received.

I started noticing more and more surgical and N-95 masks being worn, fewer people refilling their cups of coffee; fewer people in general. It was right before New York City shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We were told to stay home for two weeks, I thought, this is perfect. I worked seven days a week, went to culinary school on the weekends, and participated in pop-up dinners after my full-time job. Two weeks away from people? Much needed. I figured this would be the most rest I would get working in this industry. I wanted to take full advantage of this experience. What I didn’t expect was that two weeks would to turn into two months and beyond.

On March 17, 2020, most of the working people in the United States were given a stay-at-home advisory; self-imposed soft lockdown. Just as I was getting the hang of a busy schedule and late nights, two weeks of slack chats, and zoom calls, the employees of this co-working space were notified that we were laid off. After promises of furloughs and reduced pay, our hearts sank. A week later, my school announced to students that classes would be closed until further notice. With no stable income, no classes to continue to network with instructors, I had to find something else.

This was a bittersweet moment for me. I was overworked and exhausted from papers, tastings, and night shifts. But the person I’ve challenged myself to be needed something to do. I took certification courses relating to the hospitality management industry and sharpened my food safety skills.

Still, months later, with no income and risking homelessness, I persisted.

As restaurants were closing for good and UberEats on the rise, the need for private dinners was constant. I assisted a chef with his private dinners, following COVID-precautions, and experienced more of the industry than I have before.

What seemed to be the end of my world was the beginning of it. I found hobbies outside of work. I stretched more, took deep breaths in the crisp wind. I looked into people’s eyes with love and patience. I saw the world become more giving in a time where so many lives were being taken away. I received more phone calls from friends and witnessed communities join hands virtually. Although it is not my preferred way of social interaction, it showed me the innate ingenuity within humanity. With more precautions, more risks, and more challenges, COVID-19 continues to remind me that everything can disappear in the blink of an eye. I was focused on my destination, without realizing this unplanned story is part of my journey.

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DURING

WORDS BY CARMEN HARRIS Some days I say to myself, “I have no idea how I got here.” Some days “here” is smiling as I’m driving over the peacock greens and blues of southern Maine’s frigid waters. Some days “here” is buying thermoregulating sheets for my perimenopausal 40-year old body, and most days “here” refers to being a Black woman who co-owns an eight-week old bar and restaurant in the middle of a pandemic and racial reckoning.

I never dreamed of opening a restaurant and I don’t come from a formally culinary-trained family —except the trainings in my mother’s Lenox-plate clad kitchen in Tennessee baking Apricot Brandy Pound cakes, or the lessons learned standing beside my Aunt Diane in Eastern North Carolina watching her make hot water cornbread, and my maternal grandmother’s spirit coursing through my veins as a head cook at a local elementary school in Muscle Shoals, Alabama— but here I am. I am suspended between the worlds of dreamer and doer, native tongue and foreign language, the lover and the beloved in Biddeford, Maine.

I am making sure my 27-seat dining room finds her way from surviving to thriving through a pandemic and yet another national reckoning for white folks with the civil liberties of Black folks.

This revolution will be televised—again. Or, in my case, written about, journaled in, prayed over, and Kirk Franklin-styled stomped on.

I’m living and working in southern Maine searching for and perhaps finding a home for new dreams. Yet, longing for the home and comforts of Blackness of the homes I left in Tennessee, Georgia, and D.C. I think my story, like that of many people in food and wine, is a migration story. It is a voluntary exodus from one homeland to another seeking a personal sense of belonging to self and longing for choice. We all have been Black girls in Maine once or twice before. We said yes to working or studying in someone else’s kitchen far from home only to leave that place to go on a journey to find the next place where we could root our work or our dreams in the home of our core being, our ultimate place of home.

I have a great sense of knowing that I’m in Maine because I said yes to the unknown. It sounds like hyperbole, but it’s true. How can I know and unknow at the same time? It’s the shit they’ve been trying to extract from Black women since the beginning. Our knowing—yet our ability to thrive despite the unknown.

I don’t think many Black women or young girls

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have the space or privilege of saying yes to the unknown like I did. We don’t have the freedom to ask “How did I get here?” because we are born into being Black in America. That’s our answer.

This birthright forces many of us to make knowing decisions based on what’s good for others in our families and not ourselves—this is the legacy of 1619 that haunts us through COVID-19.

I was given the space to say yes to the unknown because I had been fired from a job. I suppose that means I was already living in the unknown.

That is the paradox that a pandemic teaches us— there is no real knowing of what’s next. Only an innate knowing of our own truth for what should come next.

Many Black women, like myself, by the nature of our grandmothers, mothers, and aunties have a spiritual knowing about us that is unique to us. It’s our thrival-hood and the genesis of our genius. It’s an innate intuition that tells us when we can give a full-bodied yes and when we have to say hell nah. And when given the space, resources, and ability to say yes… we, Black women, thrive and we create beyond our wildest imaginations. I was offered space, resources, and the ability to say yes to create a restaurant and bar.

Out of the primordial dust of this pandemic, my prayer is that more Black women will be given the chance, access points, space, and self-permission to say yes to the unknown. The spiritual knowing within will guide us. Trust it. Know it. Cultivate it. It is she who longs to be discovered and create within you. She whispers to you until you know you can do this, and you can do it better than anyone else.

Even if, like me, you have never worked one day in a restaurant before the moment you opened your very own. She wraps you in the confidence to say ‘yes’ to the unknown with a knowing that you can not fail. She is with you, always.

My whispers came two years ago. I met my business partners on my third annual summer vacation to Maine in August 2018. I was sitting at a bar with Brian, the bar’s bartender. Brian is half-Filipino and half-Irish, 30-something with a man bun and alchemy symbol for salt-water tattooed on his forearms. Over the course of the night, he made the best mezcal cocktails I’ve ever had and shared his dream of opening a small, intimate cocktail bar in Biddeford. Three days later, I, along with my Biddeford-born bestie, Julia, met Brian and his business partner, Brittany, at a local coffee shop.

Our conversation waffled between their lucid dreams and my celestial experiences at the World’s Best restaurants and bars. We shared hopes, ideologies, and visions for how hospitality could be fair and equitable for people of color by investing in people over profits. Mostly I remember an exchange about changing the ‘gatekeepers’ of an industry to people who are Black, Black women, Brown, queer, and indigenous folks. At the end of that meeting, we all said yes to the soul of a new way of being in the industry. The soul of a new way of knowing for our industry is what I hope every little Black girl who yearns to make her own wine or open her own restaurants walks into post-pandemic. Every bit of my body said yes that day. I placed my hands in prayer position and bowed to Brian and Brittany in gratitude without any idea of what I was getting into—I bowed to the unknown. I surrendered to the Great Knowing. It’s how I got here.

I tell no Black woman a new story when she hears surrendering has not come without great personal sacrifice. I’m left feeling without a home for my Blackness here in Maine—especially in the middle of a pandemic and a Black Lives Matter movement. These movements only seem to amplify my isolation. I long for and search for Blackness here—feeling like a foreigner in a culturally native land. I work in a space where no one knows who Bobby Brown or New Edition is when I play them during our pre-service meetings. I play Bobby Brown’s “Roni” for me and my desire to feel like I’m at home. Even when our mostly middle-aged white guests tell me how much they love our playlist, it’s not for them—it’s for the one Black woman floating around the outdoor tables. I am the lover and the beloved of this new home I am creating for myself in Biddeford, Maine.

In the middle of a pandemic, I’ve come to realize that home never leaves me. I exist in the duality of being at home and longing for home.

My strength and my vulnerability is being a Black woman who left a geographical home to experience a new home being created within me and for girls who look like me. By virtue of being a Black woman, I can dream about home while becoming a signaler of a new home for leadership and ownership in our industry all in the same breath. Right here. Right now. I am here.

I can thrive right now by grounding myself in the faith of being a Black woman. We always thrive and we always find our way back home.

Where the Center Is WORDS BY YEWANDE KOMOLAFE

I.

The process of writing my recipe for ékọ began subconsciously. It felt good to be standing in my own kitchen again, anchored by familiar ingredients. I was working my way through a 5-lb. bag of dried corn, soaking and pressing the kernels for their starchy milk. I would ferment the result for a few days and make a corn porridge, something to give my toddler, Asha, before bed. I was doing this over and over again.

Soon I was soaking rice too – blending it, fermenting the batter, mixing in some yeast, frying it off in small batches and handing the results to Asha. I wasn’t desperate to write the definitive recipe for sinasir. I was desperate for a textural perfection I could taste and feel: perfect chewiness inside, perfect crust outside. Asha was home because there was no day care to send her to. I was measuring the success of each batch of sinasir by how she devoured it, greasiness smeared from her fingers onto every surface she could reach.

If the goal of a finished recipe wasn’t guiding me, then what was? I stayed focused on my senses as I navigated the dish - the sound of the rice grains being ground, the sourness wafting from the fermenting rice, how the finished dish’s toothsomeness and palate-pleasing aerated surface contributed to each delicate bite. The long process of fermenting and re-fermenting a single ingredient soothed me into a kind of trance, one Asha could observe from her highchair, and one that kept me from focusing on the pandemic spreading beyond my small apartment walls.

II.

On the 23rd of February 2020, I was in the departure terminal at Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Lagos, Nigeria for the second time in three days. I was saying goodbye to my parents for the second time in three days. I was presenting my Nigerian passport, my green card, and re-printed status documents to the proper authorities for the second time in three days – the same authorities who’d sent me away the first time because they weren’t convinced I had what I needed to enter the United States (such is the relationship we Nigerian passport holders have with the current administration). I was holding myself together, holding onto my husband and my stoic Asha – just turned one – and holding onto the idea that I still might not be able to board the plane back to New York.

An overwhelming sense of relief has always felt, for me, like the eye of a hurricane: it’s the same air as before, it just isn’t whipping me as fast. Once I was on the flight, buckled in and mask on, I knew the sense of relief would pass as quickly as it came.

On the flight home, I was already thinking about how hard this year was going to be. Therapy, I told myself, would help me make progress on the anxiety that had been building within me since my daughter was born. But I had no idea how much that anxiety would deepen after Lagos. The normal generational gap between child and parent had been intensified by the distance between myself and my parents - two continents, a travel ban that made visits less assured, and now a burgeoning pandemic. Having lived in the United States for the last twenty years, I had missed a lot of my parents’ lives, and they had missed mine. I thought a visit with their first grandchild would help us relate to one another again, to bridge those intervening years. My childhood on one shore, my adulthood on the other. That chasm felt as uncrossable as ever. They relished seeing her and seeing me, as a 16-year-old. The flight back to New York wasn’t taking me away from any of this discomfort.

III.

A few weeks after my return, New York City shut down. So many of us were drawn into the kitchen, finding solace in baking, braising, canning, grilling, etc. But the kitchen has always been my workplace. In my career, kitchens have evoked wild rushes of adrenaline, acute anxieties, as well as heightened and sustained sense perceptions.

But now I couldn’t cook anywhere but home. So I cooked to release the emotions I had bottled up in me. And that process became recipe development for my debut cookbook. I stood in my kitchen with my daughter on my hip, ladling the perfect amount of sinasir batter into a hot pan, grinding corn to ferment for Ògì paste, tasting different batches of spiced tigernut milk. I was going through the healing process of two decades of living in a measure of uncertainty, of living in a present with a distrustful gaze at the future. But I was creating.

The process of creating these recipes has been a powerful outlet for me. I have rediscovered a love for how memories can guide us.

Love brings forward an intensity of emotions that disorders the intellect. At the moment we fall in love, we discard our habits, our prejudices, our cherished beliefs – and so much more. It is this space we find ourselves in when the hard work begins. Eventually, in time, we reorient ourselves. Right now, I am working from home, honing approaches and processes, and uncovering memories along the way. I am allowing myself to be guided toward the center of this experience and focusing on where the center is. Some of us yearn to map a future that never comes. Some of us live in the past. I am squarely in the middle. I live in the present, because that’s where the healing has to be.

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Prayers: An Immigrant’s Culinary Odyssey WORDS BY AMANDA YEE ALTAR AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY AMY DIAZ-INFANTE

When The Blues Woman was dealt her final blow, and it was clear that she would not be a brick-and-mortar restaurant, I sank into grief. I battled feelings of loss and of unworthiness. To paraphrase bell hooks talking of notable women, “I found myself falling into madness when the world did not recognize me and I could not recognize myself in the world.”

Most Black Americans are not afforded the privilege of international travel, and here I was: a Black American who not only traveled, but had the privilege that every artist coveted—space to imagine and create. How was I not able to secure the bag for Black folks? The feeling as if I had just rendered Black and Brown girls everywhere invisible called and recalled like a pesky debt collector.

The three years I spent battling for The Blues Woman—a restaurant intended to tell the story of Black American women who trekked the great migration in search of the Promised Land— seemed to be in vain. I held to my vision when Danish business partners gaslit me just long enough for my visa to run out. I invoked every prayer ritual I knew and asked spiritualists to intercede when the restaurant space refused to manifest itself. I sold what I could to make ends meet when another business partner stole from me mercilessly until money was scarce.

Did the universe not hear my prayers when I stayed up until the wee hours of the night prophetically proclaiming all that The Blues Woman was meant to be, my love letter to Black women, a thank you manifested? I dreamed of a space free from the white patriarchal gaze. I knew it would be deliciously radical and a fuck you to fine dining that wanted people like me to play by its violent rules. Did the universe forget me and the promise it made to my ancestors when I would brood over her like a hen would its chick?

Menus were created and executed in faith. Colors were picked out for her walls. Her logo was the freshest on the block. Momentum and labor pains, but no baby.

Moving to a new country, I didn’t expect to miss the smells, colors, textures, and tastes of familiar foods. I knew I held those things in my heart. I thought at most, I would miss my family, and friends. Growing up with mixed parents in a Black and Asian home, I had learned to be open to most new experiences or things that didn’t fit into a myopic narrative.

When my eyes found dry land in Copenhagen, I was excited about all of the new sights and new culinary adventures waiting to be had. I thought I would build afresh, forgetting all of the restraints I had known as commonplace in hopes of expanding. For

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me, Copenhagen was The Bay Area in the early 2000s, a spaceship my Chinese immigrant grandparents had built when they believed a new world was possible, James Baldwin’s Paris—in short, a blank canvas and in the longer ways, more than a blank canvas.

I imagined having the freedom to move beyond the gaze of trauma and sorrow, which America had defined as the only place Black folks were permitted to exist.

I imagined having the freedom to explore joy without someone questioning my right to it. America made me exhausted. I could sense and see glimpses of who I was outside of the confines of white supremacy and capitalism. I knew I wasn’t their product, but who and what was I? I learned how to pronounce havthorn (how-torn) and came to know it as sea buckthorn. I participated in the illusion of hygge. I relished in the 35-hour workweek and built a community with all the time I had left over. Time had allowed me to carve out a small space to think and put together the wisdom, cultural practices, and stories my ancestors left for me.

I (re)membered my Black great grandma, a phenomenal chef who was a part of the Great Migration. When she wasn’t feeding rich white people in Potrero Hill, she was known to pull fried chicken out of her purse when anyone complained of hunger. I (re)membered Tao Yuen Pastry on Franklin. I began to miss the burrito truck on 14th. All I could think was this taco in Copenhagen, despite its publicity; it didn’t taste anything like what they’re cooking up in East Oakland or Mexico— but what was missing? I would get angry at interpretations of kombucha. Flat. Bitter.

“Is my gut flora even benefitting from this?”

I questioned mockingly.

Maybe the anger stemmed from what seems almost ineffable, but the closest I can get to describing it was “the lack of (re)membering.” Their tacos didn’t tell or retell the stories that I (re)membered. Their fried chicken lacked a golden scald and their kombucha wasn’t meant for my gut flora. In moving across seas, I had made the choice to be forgotten or maybe to leave the collective memory.

In a well-known biblical story, God

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came to Abraham in a vision and promised the elderly, childless man and his wife, Sarah, that their offspring would number the stars. This man took into account his age, took into account that he had tried for decades to conceive with his wife and, yet, still believed the word that came forth. This belief was credited as righteousness.

Now, whether that story actually happened or only serves as an allegory, I can’t help but to picture a frail, wrinkly, and olive-toned man looking down at his groin in confusion while God spoke to him in a vision. I can only imagine the racing thoughts that he felt as he recounted the times he tried to bring forth an heir.

Maybe he recalled the miscarriages his wife had; maybe he recalled the hope deferred as he begrudgingly accepted that his inheritance would go to his servant; maybe he winced as he remembered the tears he wiped away from Sarah’s face as she weathered grief and despair, and yet, somehow he still managed to shrug his shoulders and agree with the promise.

In the 25 years that it took for the promise of a son to finally be fulfilled, the couple had endured several setbacks.

Sarah lost all hope and, in a moment of weakness, asked Abraham to sleep with her maidservant in order to bear a son.

These constant struggles to find comfort in rest continually caused them to question the promise that God made them and, at certain times, the character and nature of God. So, when Abraham and Sarah finally received the promised son, and he comes of age, God asks Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, saying, “Take your son, your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.”

I clearly see the record scratching for Abraham when he hears this. Didn’t this fool just promise them the very son he was asking them to lay on the altar?

Furthermore, did he have to rub it in like that, though? Talkmbout, “Your beloved son?” Damn, God, chill cuz. How many times would Abraham and Sarah have to prove their belief in a fickle God? I believe that the 25 years Abraham and

Sarah spent fighting toward the promise had prepared them to rest in a different set of mores. Nancy Brady Cunningham, author of A Book of Women’s Altars, says, “An altar is a place you go to reclaim your...intuition. This place says to the busy, rational mind, ‘Quiet down—let the deeper, wiser [person] within you speak!’

Over time your view of yourself and your place in the world shifts. The altar becomes a sacred space because you place symbols of your true self on it. As you sit before the altar, these symbols act as mirrors reflecting your deeper self. You see yourself differently while looking in the mirror, and, in time, you find the courage to be this authentic self more frequently in the world.”

Abraham and Sarah knew they would have to depend on a set of structures that were out of the realm of their capability.

The promise was never about the promise, as much as it was about bringing them closer to the fullness of self. The tests were never about proving their belief in a God that demanded His insecurity and jealousy be met with proof, as they were about undoing the belief that striving under an oppressive system—a system that seemed commonplace— would secure their legacy.

When the Danish clerk at Border patrol politely and quietly asked me to step aside with a smile, I almost didn’t hear her. I was confused. “Is there a problem?” I asked, confident there wasn’t.

I was returning from spending three long, soul-searching months in Santa Barbara, California. It was there that I rolled, grappled, and wrestled in a dank makeshift basement apartment (complete with hot plate). I would not let go until the universe changed my name from “Amanda Yee: perfectionist, productive, striving, understanding joy in theory, but won’t lay her grind culture ass down long enough to rest head,” to simply “Beloved.”

“I did the work, damn it!” I protested to the universe as the clerk held that curled lip smile and insisted I wait for her manager. I prayed, in the same way one prays when a parent promises a whoopin’ the moment they are free of company. Should I fake sleep?

DURING The last three months were a brutal doing and undoing: The more I begged the universe for clarity on next steps for my future, the more quiet it became.

Didn’t it care that I had just lost The Blues Woman?

The more I pleaded for some form of productivity, validation, or distraction from joy or rest, the more I was presented with a delicious meal prepared before me in the presence of my enemies. Recalling the canceled flight and 30 hours without sleep cramped in between two people on a plane just seemed to add insult to injury.

“Someone will be with you in a second,” she assured me as she held her nervous smile. As I waited, I was sure that any mistake about letting me through border patrol would be cleared within a matter of minutes. All I could think about was coming home and sleeping forever. I didn’t have time for Danish tomfoolery, I had endured it for five years.

Four hours later, after I was interrogated by Danish Police for doing “illegal work” because I volunteered a year prior. I was strip searched and made to give my bank info against my will without a lawyer present. I was let out of jail, without possession of my passport and told I could go home.

Forget sleep, I thought on that long taxi ride home, screw the universe! As if it wasn’t enough that I had just lost my restaurant, now I would have to use my rent money to secure a lawyer as I faced deportation. Was there no world that would embrace me?

The universe continually pulled out my chair, “Sit here, and eat!” it admonished. “This meal looks amazing,” I exhorted, as I looked over the offerings on the table “but what about all of these enemies watching me eat?”

I am futureless. I am going to be deported. I need to prove my worth. I sulked, still suckling on the teat of grind culture, quickly forgetting the three months I had spent in Santa Barbara.

“Oh, Beloved,” I could almost hear

the universe chuckle. “Can you trust that the preparer of the meal loves you enough to prepare a meal that you can enjoy without having to prove you are worthy of it?”

If I am honest, my grief over losing The Blues Woman as a brick-andmortar was cradled by a belief system that was still tied to the colonization of my body. The worlds I continually wanted to embrace me were worlds not built with me in mind. My belief that I could only find happiness after something exterior grounded itself in my life— a restaurant, a legacy, proof that I was worthy—was a lie that prohibited me from generating and experiencing my own feelings. Whose product am I? I take deep, thoughtful breaths. I find the courage to open the gifts left for me. I reread the love letters written in blistered feet as my ancestors head west; written in hope and faith as my ancestors endure slavery, Jim Crow, rape, maiming, Chinese exclusion acts, broken parental relationships, mental hospitals, erasure, misunderstandings; written by tears. I am my ancestors: I am the immigrant in the spaceship. I am The Blues Woman. I am Joy and Joy is my authentic self. I am the altar and the love letter. I am the legacy and my freedom to enjoy without having to toil or show my ticket to ride is our promise.

I will enjoy this meal: my community, laughter, a flakey, buttery cherry pie with a crystal sugar top, surfing, the ocean, travel, discovery and curiosity, my plants named after old ladies and Rocky characters, aesthetics, good books, good records, and good sex with good lovers, circumstances be damned.

Then the man said, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with Humans and have overcome.” Jacob said, “Please tell me your name.”

But he replied, “Why do you ask my name?” Then he blessed him there. So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, “It is because I saw God face to face, and my life was spared.”

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MASHAMA BAILEY

PHOTO BY CHIA CHONG

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QUESTIONNAIRE What is your state of mind right now? My state of mind is overall optimistic. However, under the surface I’m always worried.

What is your idea of bliss? Joy and happiness is the bliss I am in search of. This year has been nuts and it has me thinking about what really matters. Love. The ocean is also my idea of bliss. I can sit there all day and let the waves run over my thoughts. Now is my favorite time of year to go because it’s not too hot out.

What are you afraid of? Rats, roaches and being a fraud.

Having everything go away and not being able to build it back up again is a fear of mine.

Who are some of your role models in the culinary world?

Edna Lewis, of course. Dave Chang, Gabrielle Hamilton, Marcus Samuelsson and Jessica Harris. They all are individuals, trailblazers and rad people.

What’s your greatest food extravagance? Nice olive oil and bread. I really love good preserved fish, like salt cod or canned tuna.

What are your favorite ingredients? Peanuts—there are so many types and you can do so many things with them.

What is a dish that you’re eating or cooking regularly these days? I’m eating lots of bananas and nut butters. Not enough veggies, I’m afraid, but as I write this, it is squash and green season so I’m sure I will make up for lost time.

What’s a journey you’re looking forward to taking? I would love to visit Cuba. The whole vibe is just sexy to me.

What is your greatest regret in your career? I often like to think about where I would be if I started cooking right after high school. Not really a regret but I think of it often.

What or who is the greatest love of your life? I think that would be my Dad! He is so warm and friendly. Very loving and wears his heart on his sleeve.

What are you most proud of? I’m proud of my team. I’m proud of The Grey. I’m proud of my place in this world, my family and my accomplishments.

What is your favorite thing to eat? Pizza. I also love a good crunchy salad.

What is the kindest thing someone did for you during quarantine? I was having COVID symptoms and two of the

managers from The Grey brought me snacks and lunch and a foot soak. It was really sweet.

What’s the kindest thing you did for yourself during quarantine? Took time to sit and enjoy a cup of coffee in my home. I also joined a book club.

What’s the kindest thing you did for someone else during quarantine? We made boxes for our staff and other furloughed restaurant employees during quarantine. We made them weekly and worked with all local farms.

How have you taken care of your mental health during the pandemic? I think the biggest thing that I have done was to open up and listen to my staff regarding their feelings towards their jobs, careers and their monies. I became a sounding board and I think it has improved my management skills. I also watched a lot of Netflix.

What are two changes you would like to see in the food industry? Larger margins between profit and loss. Restaurants should be able to charge what they want in order to pay their staff. More minority owned businesses in the forefront because they are creative sources of inspiration.

What do you need to say right now? That I’m tired and refocusing my energy by finding balance between work and leisure…but I’m excited that Black voices are in the forefront.

How has 2020 radicalized you? I am more interested in my local government. It took me almost five years after my move to Savannah to start paying attention.

What is a show or film you enjoyed watching during the past several months? I love watching TV, so I definitely have a list. Girlfriends, Lovecraft Country. I also have Boomerang on repeat.’

What did you enjoy reading in 2020? I really liked reading Heavy by Kiese Laymon and The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Which organizations or individuals or philosophies did you amplify or support in 2020? The Edna Lewis Foundation.

Do you eat dessert? If so, what? Carrot Cake is my all-time favorite cake.

What are you most looking forward to? Finding a little space between my professional and personal. I feel like the two have been so interchangeable for so long that I’m ready for boundaries.

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Being Black in Hospitality WORDS BY OMOLOLA OLATEJU If I quit hospitality, it is probably because of a day I was fed up of serving white people.

March 10, 2020 was the last time I served a double cheeseburger with fries on the side to a guest. And I want to be honest with you. I don’t miss the work. Hospitality is a complicated space fraught with poor social dynamics, and worse, when you are like me: a dark-skinned Black woman in America. In the last few months of work before Governor Cuomo prohibited indoor dining, the work came to feel like a generational tandem with slavery.

Certain conditions have changed or been masked, the major difference really being we are paid for our labor.

The dining procedure seems benign enough, but under only a minor examination the whole exchange gets nasty very quickly. Tipping is racist. Tipping was popularized in a newly post-slavery America. Black people had limited work options. Employers knew this, and used it to their advantage. They quickly realized they could get away with not paying newly freed workers by placing the burden on guests to tip. Radical XChange’s work around the cultural history of hospitality, racism, and tipping is a great resource to shed light on the history of service and how that culture continues to harm workers today.

For me, racism has been wedged into almost every interaction of service from beginning to end. I haven’t had a job yet where racism didn’t pollute the day-to-day.

I’ll deliver a plate of mornay covered fries and a root beer float, and before the frosted glass hits the table, a white guest comments on how they “really like” my fro and that I remind them of their Black girlfriend they dated a year ago. I’m expected to take this as a compliment, but I don’t. I’m not a spectacle.

Other times I’ll send a bubbling plate of scrambled eggs dressed with a sherry demi-glace and seared foie gras, and white guests comment on my extraordinary ability to remember everything from a two-person order. Do they do this to white servers? Service has many complicated parts, but jotting down the notes of a two-person order is often not it. Service is only as complicated as the guest makes it. But the drama is constant. Where else but in the lengthy shadow of slavery does this relationship even exist? Where the guest has the highest level of demands, and the lowest level of expectations of how you’ll be able to meet those needs.

All wrapped with a ribbon of entitlement.

In spite of the pandemic making hospitality jobs scarce, I am grateful to not participate in this work right now.

Service doesn’t give you the right to dehumanize me.

Service doesn’t give you the right to address my political views.

Service doesn’t give you the right to address my body, especially because it is Black.

Service doesn’t give you the right to treat me worse than any other stranger you meet, because I will bring you a meal.

But guest incidents aren’t the only symptom of racism in the hospitality industry. There’s plenty wrong with how colleagues treat each other too. And sometimes the subtlety of an exchange can tell you a lot. A white team member will ask my opinion on the music that’s blaring at the restaurant, “How much do you love this song Lola?”

The only connection I have to the song, since they didn’t ask me about the song that played before Chance the Rapper’s latest hit, is my race.

We are a result of our knowledge, work, and experiences. And if you aren’t actively working on being anti-racist, I can’t trust that you have applied a thoughtful lens to any words shared in a casual exchange with a Black colleague.

Questioning myself, asking myself whether I belong, and having to prove my experience as a hospitality professional is also a product of racism. Toni Morrison said it better saying: “The very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.” Racism has a maddening effect where you are forced to explore the impact of racism, while facing racist others who attempt to tell you the opposite. That’s why I am most offended with racist incidents that are wrapped in jokes. I delivered our Korean fried chicken and I was met with a comment that a guest’s hair was the same as mine, but 10 years ago because back then he had a “Jew” fro. And yes, he mentioned he wasn’t Jewish.

I indulged him to some extent, and I know many other servers have had this experience. You don’t have a choice in the matter. Your wage, your ability to pay your bills, and put a little bit of money in your savings account is dependent on how good your guest feels. So if they want to discuss why their liberalism doesn’t extend to Black Lives Matter, I have to listen. I can’t give feedback.

I have to absorb that indignity and trauma.

It’s not right. We deserve better than this. For now, I’ll be working from the outside until the people I work for and with are taking my experiences and those of my Black colleagues as seriously as their own.

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Don’t Sleep on the Herbs WORDS BY TONYA ABARI PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF SUNYATTA AMEN

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DURING When it comes to electrifying dishes, Sunyatta Amen, a fifth-generation master herbalist says the best-kept secret to flavorful cuisine can be found right in your own garden.

In the past few years, bland food has been at the center of countless jokes all over the internet. From memes to virtual food wars, people who love flavor have adamantly shown how unseasoned food can ruin both single meals and dinner celebrations alike. It’s no secret that the right amount of seasoning can truly make or break any dish.

Those who take their taste buds seriously believe the secret to good cooking lies in the seasoning. And it’s often the supplementary additions that satisfy the palate the most. There are numerous universal tips for improving flavor such as adding meat and including taste enhancers like salt, nutritional yeast, or liquid aminos. And then there are the practical guidelines like pre-seasoning proteins and adding more seasoning to cold foods versus hot dishes.

“Although people believe that meat makes or breaks flavor in the dish, it’s actually the herbs. Everything that makes food tastes great is a vegetable. It’s the paprika, garlic, cayenne. It’s the smoke and the salt. Seasoning food with dry herbs at the beginning and fresh herbs at the end really elevates the taste,” says Sunyatta Amen, master herbalist and founder of Washington D.C.-based Calabash Tea and Tonic.

Born and raised as a plant-based vegan, Amen’s entire family enjoyed meals that were home grown from the family garden. And at the root of all the family’s treasured dishes were herbs, not meat.

“One of our treasured meals is coconut curry stew. We’ve served this dish not only to family, but to customers and friends – and I live for the looks on their faces when a spoonful of this enchantment goes into their mouths,” explains Amen. A blend that honors her Aunt Gem – owner of a well-known Jamaican restaurant – the infamous Jamaican curry seasoning consists of a “tantalizing blend of turmeric, coriander, cumin, cayenne pepper, and more.”

Amen’s grandmother always said, “Whoever controls the food, controls the people.”

“From her, I learned that the chef influences the mood. You can make their nervous systems calmer, you can amp them up. Even the smells are therapeutic. She taught me these magical elements of the kitchen. She really encouraged me in those ways. Flavorful food gets people’s blood pumping and moving. And all of that magical ancient science comes through,” says Amen.

Are you trying to get your family to cook more flavorful dishes with herbs? Amen has some sage advice of her own, which includes getting back into the garden and into the kitchen. “You might have to fool everyone into cooking with herbs. That’s what my grandmother did. She tricked me into it! She used to say ‘you make the best tea and drinks.’ We call that a cooler or a wash – herbs soaked in water or juice. ‘You have such a good hand for that’ she’d say. So what would have been a chore was instead a great compliment. And now, my own daughter goes outside in our garden to pick herbs for sodas.”

Using herbs not only amplifies the food, it can play a significant role in your loved ones’ health. The ancient properties of plants can have positive effects on your overall well-being. Amen emphasizes, “Many of my clients, who are Black women, have been affected by fibroids, PCOS, anemia from heavy menstrual cycles, and painful menopause. Through plant-based nutrition and infusing herbs for seasoning, we eliminate food items that could aggravate health issues.”

Sunyatta Amen wants everyone to prioritize flavoring food with herbs. “Food is significant to us. The places we’ve traveled and lived can be found in our seasonings. We want flavor, but you don’t have to sacrifice taste by using herbs. I can show you how to use liquid smoke and veggie sausage to flavor your collard greens and I promise you won’t leave the table feeling unsatisfied.”

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Give Food Bloggers Their Flowers... Now A conversation with Angela Davis and Kia Damon

PHOTO COURTESY OF ANGELA DAVIS

If you haven’t heard of The Kitchenista, you’re lying. That’s just the bottom line of it. Angela Davis, founder of The Kitchenista Diaries, is a successful food blogger and recipe developer living in Detroit, Michigan. Angela has been carving out a space for her voice since the early days of Instagram when people were unironically using terms like “nom nom” and “food porn.” Through the noise and saturation, she solidified herself as the blueprint for modern food blogging. Despite the material, she struggles to receive recognition for her impact and finds herself in the face of blatant erasure. Now that we’re in the midst of a viral and racial pandemic, many chefs and cooks have taken to the digital realm to create and survive. Many are also becoming privy to the often inevitable burn out of Black creators. In her own words, she was “in the house before the pandemic.” I checked in with my friend and fairy cooking-godmother to see how she feels about the great digital migration and how she takes care of her mind in the current reality.

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Kia: For the folks who are still unfamiliar, please tell us who you are and how long you’ve been in the game.

Angela: I’m Angela Davis, The Kitchenista, and I started my blog in 2012. I started my work with food in the digital space, so other than being a server in a restaurant, I never had work experience in the food industry before starting my website.

K: How are you feeling now, about your craft, about your life, since the pandemic started?

A: That’s such a difficult question right now. I feel like nobody’s okay. And we all just kind of answer it and pretend that we’re okay. It’s a roller coaster.

Some days I get my work done. Some days I’m in the fetal position. That’s the kind of year that it’s been. I’ve been through difficult periods since I started this work, privately. This year, it feels like the things that I’ve been enduring privately, I don’t necessarily have to hide anymore. People are more open to being vulnerable about their mental health.

We don’t have to pretend like this is easy anymore.

I think for a lot of Black women it’s never been easy.

We’ve always had to kind of push through and maintain a smile while we were struggling to make ends meet, make content or whatever it was that we were dealing with. Now, I think people are more open to just saying that, “hey I struggle some days”.

K: You’re also someone that is extremely visible with the work that you do and with the reach of your own personal voice. I am someone that struggles with visibility and how my mental health ties into that. There’s this feeling that you always have to be “on,” and especially now during the pandemic and because nobody is getting jobs these days. How do you maintain yourself, before you have to jump back into that highly visible Internet sphere?

A: A lot of downtime. I’ve always been an introvert, so I think for me, it was interesting that I was able to do the whole social media thing for so long.

My personality offline is much more reserved. The Internet was an easier way for me to communicate, and that social anxiety was removed, initially.

When the pandemic happened, I feel like everybody just kind of rushed to be like, ‘well now you’re home, so you should be ‘LIVE’ all day’.

K: There’s this sudden demand for Black women, as if Black women haven’t been doing this the whole time. There’s this invasiveness on top of that.

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Mostly everyone’s at home, but now there’s this supreme lack of boundaries and respect that was already difficult to navigate as a Black woman, pre-pandemic. How do you combat that and still create content?

A: We’ve become living content for other people to consume and you can get lost in that. You do have to work harder to have boundaries and sometimes it feels impossible. Like, if your work mostly relies on creating digital content, then right now that’s the name of the game. But you can still, I think, try to enforce those boundaries and seek out work that vibes with your comfort level. So, for me, I’ve resisted a lot of video work, despite everybody saying ‘you gotta do video, you gotta do video,’ I’m just now starting to get comfortable with it. From a business perspective people want to see you on camera. They want to see your face; they want to connect that way. It’s just not my comfort level; I like to communicate through writing and through photography and sharing my recipes and telling a story that way. So, you can consume the content that I’m giving, but I’m not offended if the next person is on LIVE every day and that’s what you gravitate towards. I’m still gonna be in my corner of the world. I think content creators should be careful right now. You can burn out that way and I’ve burned out many, many times.

K: What sets you apart is that you built that longevity for yourself from the jump and carved out your own voice. It’s so important and exciting and fulfilling to watch Black women whose voices otherwise go unheard be prominent on their own, unfiltered and uncompromised. When you see a Kitchenista recipe you know it’s a Kitchenista recipe.

When you read the captions you know that’s The Kitchenista’s voice. How did you get to that point when you said ‘this is my voice, this is my vision and this is who I am’?

A: I think it just came from my experience in my career prior to this, where I didn’t have a whole lot of autonomy. Now, I have the freedom to share my own voice in the way that I see fit, and I take on the work that I want. I work for the people that I want. I don’t have to compromise in that way. I guess, part of it is just my personality. I’ve never really been into the plastic and the fake. You know, I’m very much grounded in reality in that way. It’s too much work to pretend that you’re somebody else. If you are constantly putting out this fake kind of, superpolished content, how long can you keep that up?

DURING I’d rather cook real food that means something to me and share whatever it is that I’m going through or thinking about in that moment and show people that’s who I am, for better or worse.

When I started my blog, I had my job. I don’t think I was going through anything crazy that first year, but then, when I lost my job, I was pregnant with Raven. My whole life turned upside down, I had to move home, struggling with a difficult pregnancy, followed by postpartum. Everything that came along with mental health issues that already existed was just exaggerated. I had a choice. I could hold all of that in and just post pretty pictures online, or I could say, ‘hey, this is what I’m going through’. I chose to do the latter because it was easier. People gravitate towards that. Whether it’s because they identified, because they were also going through something, or because it was refreshing. I just stuck with it, because it’s easier to be yourself.

The other part of it was from a financial standpoint. I didn’t have all those resources when I started. I wasn’t doing staged photoshoots, because I couldn’t hire a photographer; I was taking pictures with my phone.

A: For those first five years everything that I put on instagram or on twitter, was my grocery budget.

If I had to make a meal for me and my children, whatever we ate that day, is my content. When I went through that period of unemployment, I was on SNAP for two years. I had my four or five hundred dollars a month to buy food. I used that to write recipes for my blog. I used that to sell a cookbook. So, it was always about working with the least and trying to do the most. I couldn’t do the whole production that everybody was doing and I got comfortable with that.

K: How do you think people respond to your food?

There’s so much diversity in what you do.

A: When I came out those first couple years, I feel like people didn’t know how to respond to some of the food I was cooking. It was like, ‘oh she wants to make everything fancy and bougie.’ while I was on food stamps.

K: Ah yes, I’ll never forget when you started cooking with haricots verts.

A: And someone tried to correct the way that I spelled it.

K: People said, ‘them just green beans!’ I wondered to myself, why are y’all so opposed to this woman cooking the food that she cooks and putting us on to other things. It definitely comes from that other pandemic of people wanting to humble Black women.

A: I had traveled all over the world as a kid. My mother’s culture, her family eats very different food than my father’s side, in Virginia. There was soul food on his side, but on her side a lot of the food was influenced by Portuguese food in New England. I struggled on social media with finding my lane because I had all of these experiences.

I lived in Europe but then, I’m from Texas. I grew up always eating Mexican food. I went to school, and the whole school was predominantly Mexican.

I’ve always embraced the culture wherever I’ve lived. The same, when I moved to South Florida, it was that West Indian, Afro-Latina influence. I just kind of gravitated towards those flavors and I still incorporate that into my food today. I think we should all celebrate our unique experiences. We don’t all have to have the same thing on our plate and it doesn’t have to look the same way. And it’s okay if you learn how to take a nicer picture of your food. It still has soul. I get insulted when people kind of imply that it’s deviated from soul food because it was prepared in a different way. I just think we all have a lot to learn and it would be nice if we could be more open minded about that. Especially when you see a Black woman that’s stepped outside of the norm. I think it takes a lot of courage to do that.

K: What do you think is next, for the people and for the culture? How do you see your longevity continuing and what other projects do you have your eye on?

A: I’m trying to build something outside of social media now. Everything that I’ve done has mostly focused on the digital space and building community online. And now I’m trying to figure out where I want to establish my roots, locally. Detroit is an interesting city because the restaurant scene took off in the last few years. There’s a lot going on!

It’s still a city that’s in need of resources for people who look like me. I joined the Food Lab with Devita Davison.

I’m doing a lot of listening and learning and understanding what it is that they experience day to day. A lot of what we talk about is just reimagining what the food industry should look like. I think we have an opportunity to build something better,

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DURING to build something different, than what we have tolerated for so many decades. I’ve always wanted my own kitchen, a place to work outside of my home.

Do I want a restaurant? Do I want to sell food?

What is it that I want to do? I just know that I need a building, so I’m looking for spaces now.

K: As someone who works in the digital realm, but also cooking in physical spaces, I’m trying to figure out how to have a digital presence that’s intentional. I think having to transition fully to the Internet is jarring.

I don’t know quite how to put it in words, but you end up going onto the Internet and not knowing how to pace yourself. It’s a different kind of taxing energy to be on the Internet full time versus cultivating yourself in the digital space and then putting yourself out there to interact with the physical world. I think people also underestimated the digital space. Suddenly it was “alright we’re at home; we’re on digital now!” It’s overwhelming. I think a lot of people underestimated how much work that actually is, which also can tie into how people look towards food bloggers and think it’s not real work.

A: Followers are not necessarily customers. Even though I have an audience, that doesn’t mean that everything is a sure bet. When you sell something, maybe you’re getting 2-3% of your audience. That’s not a lot. It’s work whether you’re doing it digital or offline. For me, social media could go away at any time. You know, these platforms, we don’t own them.

So that’s why I’ve always maintained my website.

Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter are there and they’re something else—they’re tools. But I think it would be a mistake to base your business model off of that presence entirely.

Let’s give food bloggers their flowers. You know what I mean? It’s a lot of work. Sometimes when I talk to professional chefs and they’re asking what my day to day is, I tell them, I start in the morning just like you guys. I clean my kitchen and set up my mise for the recipes. Then when I start shooting, I’m cooking, I’m shooting, I’m documenting a recipe, and I’m editing after and I’m writing after. Then I have to promote it. It’s a different kind of work, but it’s difficult.

A recipe that might take you two hours if you were just cooking it to eat is a five or six hour shoot for me with 200 photos to edit at the end of the night when I’m tired.

K: The title of this interview should be “Give Food Bloggers Their Flowers…. Now.” They don’t get the flowers, and it’s so funny because we’ll go on the Internet to figure how do we do this one thing, and

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the first one that pops up is a food blogger! Then of course, you add Black women being said food bloggers. Nobody wants to say they learned from Black women and that’s just the raggedy fact of it.

A: I feel like the food industry has always been that way. The white chefs that were learning form Black women in the kitchen from the beginning of time. For me, taking that power back is saying “I’m gonna get as much as I can through these brand partnerships and monetizing my blog.” Again, going back to money is how I’ve maintained my power in this fucked up system. What else can you do, really?

K: Who has, or currently is inspiring you? It doesn’t even have to be in food, but just as you, Ms. Angela.

A: I’m re-reading Edna Lewis. Klancy actually posted it on her page, The Taste of Country Cooking. I’m trying to go back to simpler meals so I try to connect with what makes me feel good. I cook a dish and I think, this is something where my grandfather would have been smiling down on me. Or this is something I‘d like to serve to my grandparents, that’s where I feel I’m in the right place. So when I’m reading a recipe for a smothered rabbit, you know, those country meals, they just resonate for me.

K: There’s a reason why Edna continues to endure.

She continues to live, because she has all of us as little seedlings she planted along the way. I kind of get the feeling that you want to as well with your work as well.

A: Yeah, that longevity. I want somebody to be able to just pull up my cookbook in 50 years and it’s still relevant. And that’s another reason why, the Instagram trends, I shy away from. You know, like, I don’t eat collard greens in my lasagna. In the past everything that we did wasn’t documented. You know? All of the food that our families were making, with the exception of those who managed to get cookbooks published, we don’t have a record of all of those things. Now, we have a record of everything every Black person is cooking and posting and sharing. And that will become the documentation for this period of time. Do we want to look back, and will we be proud of everything we’re putting out 50 years from now? I think about that. And I feel a personal responsibility to contribute to something that will move our culture forward.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

How will we repair our communities and the planet?

How will we nurture ourselves? How will we build?

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AFTER

The Seed Librarian Who’s Reclaiming the Pantry WORDS BY MARY FAWZY PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF NIC GROBLER AND ZAYAAN KHAN

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t’s difficult to find a word that encapsulates what Zayaan Khan does. As a food and land activist, artist, storyteller, academic, fermentation specialist, and cultural worker, she is called and called on for many things. Seemingly, the thread that underlines everything she does is to seek and teach knowledge about indigenous foodways.

While Cape Town, South Africa where Khan grew up, is one of the most biodiverse cities in the world, she noticed how separate and different the food we ate was from what the land provides. Her work tries to trace what came before the devastation and dispossession that colonialism (and its descendant, Apartheid) enacted on the land and people, and what a future can look like with this knowledge. However, in South Africa, the field of indigenous foods has become a white-washed space of romanticization, and for Khan the concept of reclamation has become vital. For her, the work of reclamation requires a deep spiritual and ancestral practice—as there is a lot of processing of the trauma that has been and continues to be. Through her endless research, experimentations and transformations of food, Khan accesses the possibility of a world in which we are once again intimately connected with the land and sea. As information sometimes comes to her in her dreams, she shows us the possibility of connecting the scientific world with the realms beyond, creating a link between the ancestral plains and the future.

The daughter of a librarian, Khan grew up around books of all kinds, spending hours in the school library where her mother worked. Her mother instilled a love for books in her children from a very young age, with the belief that books provided you the agency of seeking out knowledge for yourself. Khan says, “This has been fundamental in my life because I’m always seeking out knowledge, much to my parents’ frustrations at times.”

She laughs. As a pioneer in her field, she didn’t have many mentors to learn from, and it’s been instrumental in her ability to forge the paths that she has. She explains: “I read that library wall to wall, encyclopedias, reference books, dictionaries.” Those books provided her with a whole world to explore. Unknowingly, Khan would later become a librarian of a different kind one day—not of books, but of seeds.

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Seed libraries are places where seeds are freely loaned out, to be returned in the next harvest. Different from seed banks which are for storing seeds, seed libraries are about the movement, exchange and use of seed, and also the stories that they bring with them. They also house books, art, tools, jewelry and all of the cultural aspects of seed. Khan describes them as places of learning, stories and ancestral knowledge.

While seed banks are important for times of disaster, there is value in moving away from the idea of a “bank” which has connotations of extractive financial systems, wealth and debt. Khan explains that we are living in a time where seed has become highly contentious, “with agribusiness oligarchs, governments, world organizations and breeders all vying to continue to patent seed within a privatized system, valorizing one kind of seed over another, seed that is seen, versus seed that is unseen, that which is not patented or corporatized and thus not recognized.” She therefore emphasizes the importance of restoring the story of seed.

With that in mind, she started the “Seed Biblioteek” (Afrikaans for seed library), which she says she wants to be a place of, “reconnecting seed with story, towards resilience and sovereignty. Integral to food systems, seed is our land, heritage and future.”

While the Seed Biblioteek is currently housed in Khan’s home, her aim for the future is to be able to establish it as a public space where people can engage with it freely, with the ultimate dream being to open a seed school, which would be the only one in Africa (the last one that was in Ethiopia closed a few years ago).

She launched a Patreon account for Seed Biblioteek to build towards that goal.

Currently, Khan is working with activists, gardeners and smallholder farmers, to research, process and reintegrate indigenous food through the seeds that are hyperlocal to the Cape and its unique biome.

In Cape Town, the mountain and the sea are abundant with life and it’s a region with some of the highest quantities of endemism in the world. In precolonial

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times, people used the land for food, medicine, spiritual rites and a life of multispecies interconnectedness. But this knowledge is not easy to come by today.

Oral traditions were passed on between generations, until colonialism severed that. When a genocide of peoples takes place, such as that which happened to the indigenous Khoi people during the early encounters with European colonizers (who brought with them smallpox) where about 90 percent of the population was killed, not only does the knowledge become extinct, but so do some of the plants and animals that they sustained. Those that survived were forcibly removed from their land, enslaved and in many ways, cut off from the sea and the mountain. Land ownership was introduced by colonizers and they occupied much of the fertile land. From then, and through to the times of Apartheid, Black people were pushed onto the flatlands on the outskirts of the city, on land that was almost impossible to farm on and is prone to floods. Today, the legacy of this land ownership and Apartheid spatial planning continues.

It is through this trauma that Khan turns to seed. She believes that seeds bring agency to people in many ways: to reclaim their heritage, to be able to feed themselves and others, to grow produce to

sell, and to find joy and healing. The seed and its continuous life cycle, is a form of stability that people can lean on in times of upheaval, death and grief. And especially now during a pandemic, a time of police brutality and gender-based violence, both in South Africa and throughout the rest of the world, the seed offers a means to process life and grief.

Over a decade of work in food and land activism, Khan believes that food is an integral part of everyone’s life. She says, “Especially for those of us who grew up in the city, hate bugs and dirt, food is a way to connect with the world and everything else that lives. And by reclaiming the pantry we are able to interrogate that. We lose so much from not understanding what it is to process, transform and preserve food beyond the season. To reclaim the pantry is to reclaim that knowledge and particularly the relationships that the pantry entices out of us. Not just with the producers and growers of the food, but also brings us an understanding that we have to think of ourselves in terms of a multispecies dimension, because none of this would be possible without the biodiversity of life that it connects with. And so, food is the easiest way that we can connect with the world outside of our own humanity.”

ILLUSTRATION BY NICOLE JENKINS

AFTER

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Journey of the Book: An Interview with Hawa Hassan For the Culture spoke with Hawa Hassan, the Somali-born, Brooklyn-based chef and founder of Somali sauce brand, Basbaas about her recently released cookbook, In Bibi’s Kitchen: The Recipes and Stories of Grandmothers From the Eight African Countries that Touch the Indian Ocean.

PHOTO BY KHADIJA FARAH

WORDS BY KLANCY MILLER PHOTOGRAPHY BY KHADIJA FARAH AND JENNIFER MAY

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Klancy Miller: How did the idea for writing In Bibi’s Kitchen come about?

were happening organically. But the idea originally was just, it was a part of the business plan.

Hawa Hassan: Well, when I started my business in 2015, a friend of mine had asked me to write a business plan because I was like, “I’m going to put these sauces into the world and then I’m going to turn this business into the Heinz of Africa.” And he was like, “Okay, well, what’s the roadmap to getting there?” And I was like, “What?” He was like, “You’ve got to have a roadmap.

How are you going to market these condiments? What’s the big picture?”

And so I started to think about what would it look like if the condiments were really successful and what would it take to get there? And so, I wrote in my business plan, “start with Somalia.” Introduce people to our foods through these condiments. From there, go to the farmer’s market to interact with the customer face-to-face.

Then the goal was in 2017 to write a proposal to start sharing bigger stories about migration and grandmothers and the Indian Ocean. I wanted to have a conversation about food on a larger platform.

And I knew that, even if I were given the opportunity, I would not do the cuisine justice if I didn’t talk to the gatekeepers of the food where I come from. And so, though it was a part of my marketing tool to expand my business, it really was the mini phases in which I knew myself and the condiments needed to grow in order for me to sustain the business. And so it was: Write the proposal in 2017. Do a pitch deck. Give it to Bon Appétit. Get on their YouTube channel so that I can have a platform in which I can execute the book through once it came out. Everything just kind of aligned. It felt like the more that I did, the more things

KM: That’s amazing.

HH: I don’t know if you saw what Julia [Turshen] posted yesterday, but it was how it started and how it’s going.

I sent her a text about this dream that I’ve been living with for a long time. And that was in 2017. For me, it always starts with writing it down. And then, when I’m ready for the dream to actualize, then I tell other people about it so I have some sort of accountability. And then, when I’m really ready to work on it, I start talking to people who’ve already done something similar to it.

KM: I think that’s a really good strategy. What was the experience like of making the actual book?

HH: Hectic. There were a lot of moving parts. There were 16 women whose stories I needed to carry, and I needed to do it with tenderness, and grace, and with love. And then there were language barriers.

There were time differences. There was lack of internet. There was lack of electricity in some countries.

There were also immigration issues.

And so, it was no easy feat to bring it to life. It was challenging, but it also had pockets of rewarding moments. There were times when a grandmother would ask me, “Can you send me money?” And I’d be like, “Of course.” Or one of our sisters in Kenya, she’d been going through a rough time and she texted me. She was like, “Yeah, I’d really appreciate it if you sent me and my child money.” And in my mind, I was like, she could be hustling me, but I don’t care because what a blessing it is to be able to bless this woman.

So there were bright spots like that. And then there were times where things just worked out so effortlessly.

Like in Madagascar, where I’ve never even been and didn’t know a lot about the culture or the people there.

AFTER But I would say overall, it was a lot of moving parts, but ultimately the way that everything fell into place for me, felt like this thing is so much bigger than me. This project is ordained in some ways, and I’m just supposed to be a vessel.

KM: How did you find the grandmothers?

HH: Community. I wrote friends in London. I wrote friends in Johannesburg. I wrote friends in Nairobi. I wrote friends in Norway. So I used my very international group of friends to help me get their aunties, their grandmothers, their friends’ moms. So that was really special, because everyone, even in the acknowledgements, I think something like 30 people are thanked. Because this book really took a large group of people that I’ve met over the years to bring it to life.

KM: You mentioned that there were a lot of moving parts. What were the moving parts and what were the needs of this project in terms of building a team?

HH: It needed people that could do things I couldn’t do. Right? So it needed translators. It needed someone who could give a structure, which Julia brought a lot of structure to the book. It needed grandmothers who could openly share their story. It needed my uncle— who’s like my only family member in America—to set us up with people in Minnesota. And so, I didn’t know the proposal was a guideline into what needed to be done, but there were times when I went very far off the proposal. So, it needed its flexibility.

KM: That’s incredible. How did you deal with travel?

Tell me about the travel aspects, and the gathering of the stories, and the capturing of the images, the beautiful images.

HH: So it was important to me to find somebody who was from the continent and who lived on the continent.

Ultimately, I knew that would make things easier for me and for the book. And it was going to benefit the book in a way that it couldn’t have been done from the perspective of two people who lived in the U.S. So our photographer who speaks Arabic, Somali, Italian, Swahili, you name it. She speaks it.

She was a pivotal part of our team, because when I couldn’t go to Madagascar, she went to Madagascar.

She was flexible in that when she was in Madagascar, she had all the questions on hand for the interviews because there was no internet connection. She conducted the interviews.

And so there were times where she was stuck in immigration and I was worried like, “Oh my God,

what happens if she can’t get into Mozambique?” It’s not like I was there to facilitate. And so it was moving parts. It was me talking with an immigration officer on WhatsApp. KM: Wow. HH: There was trying to figure out her car service.

Trying to figure out did she land at 1:00 a.m. there. It’s like 6:00 p.m. here. And so I don’t know if that answers your question, but I think the best thing that I could’ve done for this project was put people in position to be successful. And I’m really lucky that I had an incredibly capable team who was willing to teach me, show me, correct me, and then adjust with me. I was set to travel last July, and then it comes out, I travel on a green card and my lawyer says, I shouldn’t go because he’s unsure of what Donald Trump is going to do in the following weeks. I said, “Okay I can manage from here.” And so my job for a few weeks was just being up at 1:00 in the morning or 2:00 in the morning, watching things on Skype or interviewing people on Skype or on WhatsApp and recording. And so it was a lot of that.

KM: What has been your favorite part of making this book? What experiences of this whole creation process have you most enjoyed?

HH: Being welcomed into so many people’s homes and being called their daughter in their native tongue, then just learning from them. And everyone in this book is so sure that their greatest accomplishment is their children.

No one talks about money, they talked about their proudest accomplishment being their children. And then they talked about how to best use time. And so for me, I walked away with this perspective of how lucky am I that I got to sit at the feet of these women and hear their stories and their experiences, and hopefully be able to adjust my life so that I’m able to live fully.

KM: What do you hope readers will take away from In Bibi’s Kitchen?

HH: I hope that when people hear and look at this book, they’re able to see themselves and their grandmothers in it. And then I hope that folks are able to adapt some of the recipes and make it their own.

And then that what they see in this book is an accurate reflection of Africa. That Africa is beautiful, that Africa’s 54 countries. That though some of the African countries are far, our recipes are still very much centered in an almost everyday pantry. So that’s my hope.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity and length.

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RECIPE FROM IN BIBI’S KITCHEN

Fit fit, broken pieces of flatbread cooked with fat and spices, is a typical dish throughout East Africa and is made with either Ethiopian-style injera (a flatbread made from fermented teff flour) or Eritrean kicha, like the one Ma Gehennet taught us how to make. It’s a wonderful way to use up leftover flatbread of any kind. You could even use leftover pita bread. The drier the bread, the more it soaks up the spices and butter. Serve with plain yogurt dolloped on top. This is wonderful for breakfast or as a snack.

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RECIPE

RECIPE FROM IN BIBI’S KITCHEN These well-seasoned greens are similar to collards, which are popular in the American South with their fragrant potlikker and are a reminder of the undeniably deep threads that tie together African and African American cooking. Sukuma wiki means “to stretch the week”—in other words, using these greens, which are affordable and readily available, can help stretch any meal a bit further. Greens are a staple in Kenyan cooking and in most East African cooking in general. Serve this dish with rice for a traditional, healthy, and completely vegan meal.

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THÉRÈSE NELSON What is your idea of bliss? Freedom. Freedom to create without restriction and the resources to do it beautifully.

What are you afraid of? I’m mostly afraid of falling short of the gravitas of the times in which we live. We have a long and deep legacy to live up to and I’m most afraid of not doing enough to meet the call of this moment.

Who are some of your role models in the culinary world? I’d say Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor is an ideological role model but then I’d also say Dr. Jessica B. Harris, Toni Tipton-Martin and Nancie McDermott are also

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women I look to as examples of navigating the food space effectively. I’m also in community with too many women to list who I consider colleagues and peers that make me sure we’re going in the right direction with reference to stewardship, so these are exciting times to be in food.

What’s your greatest food extravagance? It’s a tossup between single origin chocolate and coffee, whole spices, and fees for grocery delivery.

What are your favorite ingredients? A tie between tamarind, sumac, and licorice.

QUESTIONNAIRE

What is a dish that you’re eating or cooking regularly these days? I’m making an absurd amount of duck confit these days. It was the first dish I mastered professionally and I’ve been making it a lot thinking about the man that taught me to make it.

and editing copy, to babysitting, to sending groceries to a member in need. It’s been so cool to get outside of myself and feel like I’m being of service to someone else. It’s also been interesting to interrogate what support looks like and how a seemingly small thing to me can mean a world of difference to someone else.

What’s a journey you’re looking forward to taking? I have been wanting to go to Nevis for a few years now. The Four Seasons resort is one that I’ve been coveting since my days working at the New York property and I’m planning on making that happen in 2021.

How have you taken care of your mental health during the pandemic? I’m reading a lot. I’ve been unplugging and rereading so many books I needed to reconsider and some that I’d been meaning to get into for so long.

What is your greatest regret in your career? Not believing earlier on that Black culture could have pride of place in the professional food space. I wasted a lot of time feeling disempowered when I was actually a uniquely American chef the whole time.

What are two changes you would like to see in the food industry? Only two? Well, first I’d love to see expertise valued with resources and money. I’d love to see more publications and publishers to get out of the way of creatives of color to let them have more control of their POV, and do it with the same vigor as they do our white counterparts. Second, I’d love the industry to give the public more credit and believe in their ability to consume nuance and specificity in ways that raise the discourse.

What or who is the greatest love of your life? Black people and the legacy of our culture is the greatest love of my life. It’s part birthright, part heirloom and I feel a responsibility to it and a love for it that requires my full devotion.

What are you most proud of? I’m most proud that I’m living in a time where my biggest ambitions have the space to live and thrive because of a collective effort that demands it. I’m proud of us collectively and can’t wait to look back 20 years from now to see all the progress and art created.

What is your favorite thing to eat? Classic poured icing caramel cake is maybe the most perfect taste ever and the version by Chef Monica O’Connell of Curtis and Cake that adds miso to it is a flavor I will never forget.

What is the kindest thing someone did for you during quarantine? A dear friend sent me a houseplant because she knew I didn’t have another living thing in my house. We are both thriving and I’m unsure I was as hopeful about that being true as I should have been.

What’s the kindest thing you did for yourself during quarantine? I started feeding myself with intention. I’m a private chef and I had been neglecting my own nourishment on a pretty consistent basis so the practice of cooking just for myself without any professional implications has been monumental.

What’s the kindest thing you did for someone else during quarantine? I’ve been part of an informal mutual aid network that has been really interesting to participate in. We give resources as they’re needed and that will look like all manner of support from money to proofreading

What do you need to say right now? I think the thing that’s most in my mind these days is that we have to make our presence in space conditional but that we can’t define those conditions without context and that I’m interested in doing the work of defining that context.

How has this year radicalized you? I don’t think it has. I think what this year may have done is made me gut check my priorities and perhaps created the conditions that have necessitated movement and urgency.

What is a show or film you enjoyed watching during 2020? I’ve been revisiting Daughters of the Dust a lot this year.

What did you enjoy reading this year? Hawa Hassan and Julia Turshen’s In Bibi’s Kitchen is the book of the year for me.

Which organizations or individuals or philosophies did you amplify or support in 2020? Black Food Folks, Food Plus People, Muloma Heritage Center, The collective writing of Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor and the power of the group chat have been the heroes of 2020 for me.

Do you eat dessert? If so, what? Well, as I said caramel cake is everything, but a perfect chocolate anything is also a definite yes for me.

What are you most looking forward to? The future and all its possibilities.

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Why We Should Build Black Cooperatives and Center Black Hospitality in the New Normal WORDS BY KYISHA DAVENPORT

I could never hate myself so much as to think that I not capable of defining my own path to liberation.

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AFTER

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y name is Kyisha (Kyi, like sky). I’m the Bar Director at Tanám Narrative Cuisine, a restaurant in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Alongside me at Tanám are worker-owners Ellie Tiglao and Sasha Coleman. We are a worker cooperative, meaning a business formed for the collective, equitable economic benefit of its members. In worker cooperatives (or co-ops), the workers are the owners.

We opened in 2019, and have earned honors such as being named Restaurant of the Year 2019 by Eater Boston. For a period of time, because of the pandemic we had to close our doors temporarily but we are now open. We take the L’s of the restaurant as equally as we take the wins.

As a worker cooperative, our goal at Tanám is to contribute to the work of defining spaces for Black and brown people to explore the intersections of food, beverage, and art in their cultural histories, without the sacrifices expected of the hospitality industry: a lack of radical justice in labor, race, gender, ability. Too often, to be successful as a Black or brown person in the industry is to be silent on these issues. We cannot afford to do business as usual. To build a true hospitality movement, we must choose practice over performance.

Surely by this point, we’ve taken in many articles, creative writing pieces, social media posts, and podcasts that call for practice over performance.

These pieces are largely aimed at the overwhelmingly white hospitality industry and the clientele it serves.

But I’m over trying to explain, elaborate, and enunciate my humanity to white audiences, especially as the frenzy for unpaid education and emotional labor from Black people continues to keep business booming for every publication that is now vested in “a new direction.” The sole incentive for me to be a worker-owner at Tanám was the potential to achieve economic self-determination, and to share it with my community. So if you’re a Black, Indigenous Person of Color working in the hospitality industry, hear me out: You should start a co-op.

Maybe you’re working right now. Maybe you’ve started your own business, or you’re grinding to keep the one you work for afloat. Maybe you do both.

Social media will tell you that you should have started an LLC by now, and it’s only kind of right. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, during an existing racial pandemic, there is some opportunity here “to define ourselves for ourselves,” as our good sis Audre Lorde once declared, lest we be— pun intended, this is a food piece after all— “crunched into other people’s fantasies and eaten alive.”

But we do not necessarily need the traditional tools, talents, and techniques that the industry requires of us

to be validated in our profession. We do need each other, however. Black people have historically pooled resources for the collective benefit of the community.

Be it sharing childcare responsibilities, a sou sou or a savings club, even in starting a record label so all your people can get on, the foundational understanding that when everybody contributes, everybody eats, is not new. And while we do see the fruit of Black cooperative food efforts flourishing, are we seeing enough of it happening in the hospitality industry?

Over the summer, I had the privilege of listening to an excellent Black Food Folks conversation between Restaurant Indigo chef and owner Johnny Rhodes and Chef Omar Tate of Honeysuckle Projects. One of the highlights for me was Chef Rhodes emphasizing the need for Black people to be running food production in all of its aspects (think packaging and wholesale distribution) in addition to farming, and grocery stores, where most food justice movement work is concentrated. And while we’re all aware that the restaurant business will never be the same, there will be restaurants. It’s up to us to decide what they will look like, and do.

The coming months will determine the future of Black people everywhere. Starting at home, the door is open for us to step into our collective responsibility to ourselves, our community, our ancestors, and the ones who will benefit from our work long after we’re gone. There are myriad ways that worker cooperatives benefit Black people. Let’s break down a few: Economic self-determination. The Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research reports that 41% of Black-owned businesses closed between February and April of 2020 alone. Generations of work and effort have been decimated. We will not regain this ground using the traditional pathways of work. For example, in Boston statistically Black people are a large part of the workforce, yet earn significantly lower median family incomes in comparison to white people in the city.

Worker owned cooperatives place the decisionmaking on Black economic futures directly in working Black people’s hands. And as studies across the globe continue to show, increased resiliency of cooperatives in comparison to non-cooperative businesses— in an industry with notoriously thin margins, Blackowned cooperative restaurants could outpace their counterparts. Cooperatives generate more ideas, resources, opportunities, and profit. Chasing the bag would be easier if the profits were equally split or invested, which is the legal requirement for cooperative businesses.

But, we can no longer simply “do for self.” More Black people, especially Black women, are starting

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AFTER businesses than ever before. We’re rejecting many traditional pathways to income, yet applying the same traditional practices of capitalism that have destroyed Black communities. What difference does it make to be a successful Black business owner if your staff is underpaid, undervalued, and no one else is getting put on but you?

If leveling up looks like you stepping on a lot of necks, it’s surely not worth it in the long run. We all have to learn about how we show up in the world, and for Black folks, our lessons are in showing up for each other. Hospitality culture is enamored with the Chef/Owner who built their culinary empire alone, and is deemed a rock star who is an expert on all things and can do no wrong— even if said rock star abuses employees. Anti-Blackness in hospitality culture teaches us to emulate these so-called leaders if we wish to be successful. We need to reject Black capitalism, and the lie that only a chosen few of us get to live a good life because we somehow deserve it more. In a worker-owned cooperative, everyone who works, wins.

The revolution will be organized. Movements led by working class people directly created the rights and protections we enjoy today. But day by day, the laws fought by previous generations are being stripped of their power, if not revoked outright. Working Black people’s relationships to their employers, historically and today, are toxic at best. Time and again we are forced, and often conditioned to, expect and accept poor working conditions. One job, that pays a living income, with consistent hours, health insurance, and a retirement fund should be base level. We have been conditioned to believe these are lofty goals, and not a standard for human life. Working two and three server/bartender/prep cook/utility gigs, we tell ourselves that this is how you navigate the industry, that if you can’t hustle to the point of barely sleeping, you are a weak individual who doesn’t deserve the glory of ownership or even management.

And all for what? To have all three jobs shut down, can’t get through to HR or unemployment, be subject to sorry Instagram posts where bosses lament being white and just learning about racism for the first time, though they certainly made sure that you never got put up front on a busy shift?

At a time when Black folks are coming to grips with the reality that we have been essential workers ever since our land was stolen and we were brought to stolen lands, we must push forward and dismantle oppressive working conditions. In the most vulnerable spaces, we must organize and cultivate spaces, like cooperatives, that support revolution through fundamental practices of centering the health of

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working class people, democratic decision making, open communication, and immediate community socioeconomic benefit.

Our healing is our priority. Black folks, especially Black women and femmes, have been criminally devalued in hospitality. Our origins in hospitality go far beyond enslavement, as far back as the science of alchemy that brought us our earliest documented sips of alcohol. And make no mistake—we built the food and beverage industry, though the effects of colonization continue to erase our history and steal the resources generated from our work. Our bodies, our health, and mental and spiritual wellness continue to be terrorized by a system that feeds off of Black death and disenfranchisement.

Healing practices and healing spaces aren’t exclusive to therapy or self-care. We can transform almost anything around us to serve our highest good, and that includes our places of work. Cooperatives thrive on community and communication. When you’re capable of defining your own path to liberation, you can build that path into the guiding principles of your business. Imagine what the next few years could look like if Black people invested in not just our financial health, but our mental and spiritual health as well. What shifts would take place if we worked toward a practice of building wealth through developing strategies, systems, and organizations that consider our full selves, without sacrificing us for an ever-changing dollar amount? Cooperative movements have liberated us time and again, from the Underground Railroad to global decolonization.

Collective healing certainly seems possible when we remind ourselves of how intrinsic cooperative work is to a thriving Black people and culture.

If you’re interested— perhaps through reading this piece— in further exploring worker cooperative in hospitality, what comes next? Talk to your friends, your co-workers. Chances are, as bright, talented, culture rich people, you’ve probably brainstormed business ideas or already taken some steps toward starting a food business. Discover what resources each of you are interested in learning about to contribute to a cooperatively owned business.

Everyone has a strength to bring to the table.

Through larger co-op networks, such as the U.S. Federation of Worker Coops, you can connect to local resources, tools and training in your area. There are many thriving Black co-ops to join and link with as well. Never forget how deep cooperative work lives in our culture. We are more than capable of doing this work, and more than deserving of work that is focused on repairing our communities, hearts, and minds. Let’s build.