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.
Serving Oakland kids love & liberation at breakfast
Reflecting on the living legacy of Oakland’s Black Panther Party Free Breakfast Program
The year is June 8th,1969…Every day for the past six months, 120 kids on average have come in for a free breakfast prepared by their community. When they’re done, they depart for the school day with bellies full, ready to take on their final week before they set their sights on summer break.
Food is the basis of our lives. So, what ingredients are essential to feeling nourished and cared for in your communities? What radical possibilities exist when we honor food as the living, breathing being we are in eternal communion with?
Celebrating Oakland's Black Garden Clubs
Cultivating spaces of beauty, from the fields to one’s home to one’s community through the power of plants, people, and care for the land is revolutionary.
Many of the green spaces we see today across Oakland—from community gardens to small acreage farms—sprouted from networks of Black Garden Clubs organized nationwide in the 20th century to nourish the budding ecosystems of people, places, and plant life.
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?
