Food Culture Collective is a creative network that sparks imagination and action for climate resilient and socially just futures.
Through storytelling, cultural foodways, collaborative art, and visionary strategy, we activate grassroots food economies to heal systemic harms and nourish life-sustaining cultures.
We are a community of storytellers, farmers, organizers, healers, foodmakers, chefs, artists, and culture-bearers of all kinds who dare to dream of a future where our economies and cultures are shaped by care for the lands, waters, and peoples who nourish us.
We do food cultural work to change how we live, not just how we eat.
For the past decade, Food Culture Collective has been a place of convening dreaming, and creative troublemaking. This year we served up a feast of radical nourishment to grow our cultural capacity for social and climate justice.
We’re growing cultural capacity by:
Resourcing Food Culture-Bearers & Creatives to tell bold, purposeful stories.
To nourish a food culture rooted in community, we must shift power. Our guides in this work are the people actually taking the risks to create a food culture that feeds our collective thriving, particularly Black, Indigenous, people of color, queer, immigrant and women food culture-bearers & creatives breaking through dominant cultural norms with creativity and vision for the future.
Seeding Deep Narratives for collective flourishing
Deep narratives influence how we interpret the world and shape everything we believe in and create, including economies, technologies, and even everyday behaviors. Transforming food culture requires us to supplant insidious narratives of extraction and exploitation rooted in our nation’s history of chattel slavery, genocide, and white supremacy with liberatory narratives of food, land, and belonging.
Nourishing Food Communities, strengthening the web of relationships that connect us with our food.
We are create opportunities for connection, cross-pollination, and coalition-building across place-based and digital communities to support a shift from a transactional food culture to a reciprocal culture rooted in relationships.
All of our work seeks to cultivate and embody five core narratives:
Food is relational—rooting us in place, community, past, present, and future.
We all deserve a home. We all belong to the land.
Nourishment is a right of all people, all bodies.
Care is the essence of all labor, and all food and culture workers are essential, invaluable and skilled.
Together, we have what we need to flourish; all people are powerful and innately capable of the deep, embodied work of collective transformation.
Art & Animation by Tony Manalo Story & Creative Direction by Shizue Roche Adachi
Thank you to Coyotzin Tena, Zoe Reich-Aviles, and Alexis Flanagan for offering your voices to these stories, and to Jamiel Cal-Pin for your recording support.
