Who is Food Culture Collective?

BY JOVIDA ROSS

Food Culture Collective is a community of people committed to reclaiming and reimagining our relationship to food, land & belonging. Does that include you? 

How do we organize ourselves towards a future in which we all flourish? This question has guided my work and collaborations with movement leaders and creatives around the country for the last decade, and ultimately led me to join Food Culture Collective as director and steward. As we step into our identity as Food Culture Collective, after seven years as Real Food Real Stories, it feels like an important moment to reflect on the questions and beliefs that have shaped our evolution, and that we continue to chew on in community. 

I’ll begin with an introduction to those new to us, and a welcome home to old friends. Food Culture Collective is a community united in the belief that we all have a role to play in transforming food culture. Here, we dream beyond “fixing our broken food system” to create a food culture that supports our healing, liberation, and joy. Supported by a small but mighty staff, including myself, our ever-expanding community includes farmers and land stewards, chefs and food makers, healers, storytellers, and creatives of all kinds. More a collective project than a traditional organization, we’re dedicated to democratizing food culture to feed our collective healing and transformation.

Food Culture Collective director & steward Jovida Ross (Kirsten Murakoshi)

Many people have asked us, how do you get from food to large-scale cultural change? Too often conversations about food are pigeonholed as if our food system isn’t an expression of our culture at large. In this time of escalating, interlocking crises — of climate, of governance, of growing social divides — the change that we need to embrace is full-scale transformation.

Food offers us a powerful path forward. Food has always been at the center of how we humans envision and create the architecture of our world. At Food Culture Collective we believe food is culture, and foundational to nourishing the systems, values, narratives, and everyday behaviors that shape our world. When we transform food culture, we transform everything.

Collective transformation is not something that can be undertaken alone. That can be hard to imagine. And, it can’t be forced; it has to be willingly embraced. So, how do we get there? After many years of sharing stories of who we are and who we can become in community, we realize how important it is to explicitly give ourselves permission to dream. To ignite imagination. To play, as a way to explore possibilities outside the status quo and “try on” a new way of being. To nourish our joy. To feed what makes us come alive, as people who care about our common future. 

Living in a dominant culture of exploitation and extraction, to collectively imagine, nourish, and play are powerful forms of resistance and reclamation: we play with our food to reimagine our world. This is why we call ourselves Food Culture Collective. Our name is an affirmation, an invocation, and an invitation: we are all culture-bearers, and we can all feed a food culture that nourishes our collective healing and transformation. But we can only do it together.

A cultural collective offers space to come together and co-create. Full-scale transformation is bigger than any of us. It’s not something that one organization can hold responsibility for, alone. Because of that, institution-building could get in the way of our purpose. We know that we are but one formation within a rich ecosystem of food culture-bearers and creatives, visionaries, and organizers. 

What’s a cultural collective? That’s a question for all of us. It’s something that has to be defined (and re-defined, and re-imagined) collectively as we breathe into it together. While we are cooking up a membership program for those looking to deepen their relationships with our community, anyone who is hungry to reclaim and reimagine how we grow, cook, and gather around food – valuing mutuality, belonging, and reciprocity – is already a part of this collective project. 

Community members gather at a Food Culture Collective event (Kristen Murakoshi)

I like to think of collective as a space of convergence; a cultural delta. Delta, as in: a space where fresh and salt waters mix, and diversity abounds. A space that is dynamic and fluid, that contains multitudes. Also delta, as in: change. Collective is the power of joining forces for a common purpose. Collective is inherently relational; it’s a “bigger we.” As a collective, we hold ourselves accountable to a vision that is bigger than ourselves, and to the sacred and multifaceted lineages that powerfully resonate to future generations. 

We are bound together, in ways seen and unseen, obvious and subtle. To care for the collective means to steep ourselves in celebration and solidarity. It means that nobody’s free until everybody’s free (thank you, Fannie Lou Hamer). And that means we have to pay attention to how power flows, who it flows to, why, and how, or we risk damaging the integrity of the whole. When we democratize food culture and shift power to serve the collective, we can create a culture of nourishment for us and by us. 

Food Culture Collective is a place for you to find community, a place to cross-pollinate with collaborators, and incubate creative projects and big, juicy dreams. It is a place to root in a common purpose and organize for an irresistible future. It is a place to learn, to tell stories, to nourish each other, and to immerse in the culture you hunger for, so that we can make it real now. It is a place to feed and be fed.

Some questions we are holding, as we learn to embody the name Food Culture Collective:

• What is a dynamic and agile way to practice governance in service of our collective vision, with accountability to our community? What transparency is needed, shared meaning-making, power-awareness, and participatory feedback loops? 

• How is FC Collective tangibly shifting power, to prioritize the leadership, joy, and nourishment of food culture workers and community members who are typically exploited, and targeted within dominant culture? Specifically, those who identify as Black, Indigenous, and diasporic People of Color (BIPOC), LGBTQIA+, immigrants, disabled, and/or women. How are we truly aligning our organizational resources with values that support mutual flourishing? 

• How might FC Collective invite white people (like myself) into this commitment, in meaningful and joyfully accountable ways? How do we, who benefit from a dominant culture that prioritizes whiteness, reconnect with our own full humanity and our own living cultures, as a practice of cross-racial solidarity? 

• How could FC Collective support a decentralized activation of radical imagination and creative “rehydration” of ancestral food cultures that honor reciprocity and serve mutual abundance? 

How about you? What questions, insights, and inspiration are sparked for you? We’d love to hear from you.