Yale Sustainable Food Program

foodways

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Fall Feast: Celebrating Indigenous Food Pathways

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On November 18th, 2021, the YSFP hosted Fall Feast: Celebrating Indigenous Food Pathways in partnership with the Native American Cultural Center. The lunchtime event brought together our communities over a delicious meal, thoughtfully prepared by NACC-YSFP Liaison and Seedkeeper Catherine Webb ’23. The menu, which featured Three Sisters chili, fried squash patties, cornbread, and ground cherry pie, utilized produce grown in the Three Sisters plot on the Farm, including Buffalo Creek Squash, Skunk Beans, and White Cap Corn, grown from seeds gifted to us by Liz Charlebois, a member of the Abenaki tribe. To learn more about the Three Sisters, read Catherine’s beautiful blog post and poem. You can also read the Yale Daily News article about the event here. Many, many thanks to everyone who made this event a success! Photos by Reese Neal ’25.

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Celebrating Foods of the Black Diaspora

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For Black History Month, the Afro-American Cultural Center and Yale Sustainable Food Program have partnered together for a special event series, “Cooking Across the Black Diaspora.” The collaboration honored and commemorated this year’s 50th anniversary for both the Afro-American Cultural Center and Yale Department of African American Studies.

“Cooking Across the Black Diaspora” weaves into the Sustainable Food Program’s long-standing speaker series, known as Chewing the Fat. Building upon the conversations with past Chewing the Fat guests like Michael Twitty and Leah Penniman, we recognize the food traditions and innovations of Afro and Black-identifying peoples from across the world. In hosting Nyesha Arrington, Paola Velez, Kiki Louya, and Bryant Terry, this series held space for four chefs to share their stories, of food and identity, heritage and resilience, healing and justice.

The series culiminated in an evening celebrating the foods of the Black diaspora. Students and New Haven community members shared reflections on sweet potato pie and chosen family, soup joumou’s history in Haitian liberation, and the evolution of rice across continents. Logan Klutse ’22 offered a poem contrasting growing up hungry with the abundances of Yale’s dining halls.

Bryant Terry then followed, noting while he's proud of his cookbook Vegetable Kingdom, his live events mean little if they did not inspire community and action around Black foodways. Cooking to the tune of Bjork's "Hunter", Bryant demoed his book’s carrot soup, sharing his beginnings as a food justice activist inspired by the Black Panthers’ Free Breakfast program. Besides a few cooking tips, Bryant spoke more on the powerful connections between Black cooking and broader racial justice. The evening closed with conversation, book signings, and more of Bryant’s delicious carrot soup with Atticus sourdough.

Special thanks to the Afro-American Cultural Center at Yale, the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration, Saybrook College, LoveFed New Haven, People Get Ready Books, and the Table Underground for also supporting Bryant’s visit.

Icon Image from Bryant Terry’s Vegetable Kingdom. Photography by Noa Hines ’21.