Sink your teeth into our digital journal—a collection of dreams, notes, explorations, and meaning-making in the food culture ecosystem, authored by the Food Culture Collective team, curated & edited by Ada Cuadrado-Medina.
Play with Your Food; Reimagine Our World
The following is an excerpt from the article, “Play with Your Food; Reimagine Our World,” by Food Culture Collective’s Jovida Ross, published in Grantmakers in the Arts' GIA Reader.
My mother always grew food. Though our lives together were often unstable and unpredictable, she implicitly transmitted that we are people who work the soil. I remember wondering if the tiny lettuce seeds I pushed into the soft dirt would sprout? It seemed implausible, but they did. I learned to weed and water the vegetables we grew, and she would send me out to clip leaves for our dinner salad.
There were no family stories that came along with this responsibility. I thought it was just a way to eat on the cheap! Now, I understand that, through food, my mother connected me to our celtic, germanic, and anglo family tree. Tending plants was a small, unspoken transmission across generations.
Cyndi Suarez on “The Purpose of Play”
Excerpted below, from her book, The Power Manual, Cyndi Suarez, President + Editor in Chief of Nonprofit Quarterly, digs into play not only as a way of being in the world, but a mindset and a pathway to collective sense-making.
Play, or recreational activity, abounds in nature. The more developed the species, the more it seems to play. Play researchers have observed animals choose play over food and wondered, Why would a living being choose something seemingly extraneous, like play, over something necessary for survival, such as food? Does play have a purpose?
Browse by Series
Black Food, Love + Liberation
Black Food, Love & Liberation is an ongoing series curated by our Digital Culture Fellow, Ugoada Ikoro. Each week, Ugo captures stories of joy, beauty, community care, and thriving (beyond surviving) hidden beneath mainstream narratives shaping Black foodways and our relationships to the land.
Around the Table
Our Around The Table series features informal conversations between food workers, thought leaders, elders, organizers, and creatives about emergent insights in food culture. Together, we sink our teeth into the juicy stories, live questions, and critical conversations buzzing in food and culture spaces.
Postcards from 2050
We invited Food Culture Collective community members to imagine forward with us—to a future rooted in care and belonging. Where our food culture is defined by reciprocal relationships and is accountable to the land, water, and people to which we belong. Read their postcards from the future here.
In the Test Kitchen
Dig into this collection of articles and think pieces written by Food Culture Collective staff, community members, and friends, focused on the question—how do we transform our shared food culture?
