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.
What if we centered joy & play in our food, land & culture change work?
What would the world look like if we fed our collective capacity to embrace play? If play is a way to reimagine our world, to try on new ways of nourishing ourselves and our communities, by growing a food culture where everyone gets to be free—what happens when we step through the portal? How might we play our way to collective liberation?
These were some of the questions that Food Culture Collective’s Digital Culture Creative, Ada Cuadrado-Medina, brought to the table on March 30th, with creative improv facilitator and creator of Cattails Comix, Kai Tzeng, and community organizer and founder of Black Food Fridays, KJ Kearney. Together they shared a juicy conversation that embraced play as a tool for centering joy and creativity in our liberatory spaces.
Unearthing Joy & Liberation in Oakland’s Black Foodways
What were Black Oakland residents growing in their backyards during the Jim Crow and Civil Rights eras, and how were they feeding their communities? What did expressions of joy, play, and meal-sharing look like for those families?
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?
