Sink your teeth into our digital journal—a collection of dreams, notes, explorations, and meaning-making in the food culture ecosystem, authored & curated by the Food Culture Collective team.
How Frances Albrier watered seeds of Black liberation from Tuskegee to Berkeley
Our ancestors are portals that invite us to know Earth’s deep wisdom…
Following in the footsteps of her grandmother, who’d instituted the Mother’s Club of Tuskegee—along with Mrs. George Washington Carver and Harriet Tubman— Frances carried seeds saved from her predecessors to plant a flourishing garden of her own in the East Bay. She propagated Black communities nourished by intentional love, care, and cooperative models of collective agency – where everyone got an opportunity to eat.
How did Black women sow community healing & care into East Bay foodways?
Generation after generation, Black women have answered the inner stirrings of their spirits by radically dreamscaping pathways to surviving the throes of racial terror, brutality, and oppression.
These promptings are like seeds burrowed deep within us as the unspoken, yet ceaseless call to action of revolutionary self-love and collective caretaking. They have been nourished in me by the mothers who nurtured my blossoming long before my arrival.
The legacy of love that has tilled and ripened the grounds of community care in abundance was woven into the women that gave rise to Black Women’s Clubs of the 20th century…
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.
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?
