This week, for our collaborative ‘architecture of food’ issue with chlorophyll magazine, we have an essay by Rebecca Thimmesch on what gets lost when global dishes are given English-language names.

No English Menu, Please

By Rebecca Thimmesch

I don’t consider myself a neurotic traveller, despite being a neurotic person. I don’t overplan, I’m not dead set on certain activities or attractions: in fact, I’m quite chill. But where my neuroses come out is in my pathological need to be the waiter’s favourite foreign table. The prize? Being handed the native language menu.

There’s an element of tourist shame here. I know that travel contributes on some level to gentrification, housing crises, rising costs, et cetera, and that many aren’t happy to hear American accents in their neighborhoods. In some ways, the local menu is an attempt to assure my hosts – and perhaps also myself – that I have good intentions within a problematic industry, that I do not expect that my language is always the lingua franca.

But there’s also a practical aspect.

Culinary language learning is its own form of phonics. When we learn about a new dish in another language, we learn it as more than the sum of its parts – imbued with meaning via flavour, not merely translation from English…

READ THE REST OF THE ESSAY ON CHLOROPHYLL.

Rebecca Thimmesch is a writer and cook based in East London. Her newsletter Chic! focuses on food, culture, hospitality, and having fun.

This week’s essay — part of our architecture of food issue published in collaboration with chlorophyll magazine — is a portrait of the ways that women can build worlds with their hands (and a bit of semolina).

By Lina Saad

The first architecture I ever understood wasn’t a building. It was a pastry.

Growing up in Beirut, I remember my grandmother making maamoul in quantities that felt industrial in scale, trays upon trays of them, stacked like edible bricks across my grandfather’s home. The air was thick with the scent of pistachios, rose water, and orange blossom, a perfume that seeped into the walls and into my memory. I was too young to grasp the full meaning of what I was witnessing, but those wooden moulds, carved with ridges, lattices, and tiny sunbursts, were my first lesson in how women build worlds with their hands.

Maamoul has existed in the Levant for centuries, its origins stretching back to ancient Mesopotamia and the early Arab empires. Historically, it was a celebratory pastry, made for Eid, Easter, and other religious feasts. It was also a pastry made by women, who gathered in kitchens, courtyards, and balconies to shape hundreds by hand at a time. The work was repetitive, physical, and communal: mothers taught daughters, grandmothers taught granddaughters, neighbours taught neighbours. Even when war, migration, and displacement threaten the communities that make them, maamoul carry a lineage of ritual, relationships, and cultural continuity.

Maamoul structures time, marking the rhythm of the year. It appears every year at the end of Ramadan to signal a transition from fasting to feasting — from restraint to celebration. As a child, to me Eid morning meant waking to the sight of stainless-steel trays, each one holding dozens of pastries shaped, filled, and pinched shut by the women of my family. Their labour was quiet but immense, a choreography of kneading, filling, moulding, and baking that began days before the holiday.

When my mother moved to London, she carried those memories with her like a second spine. Her own mother had died while she was living in West Africa, building a business and raising a family far from home. Maamoul became her way of keeping that connection alive, a ritual that refused to let distance or loss erase the women who came before her.

In London, our kitchen became a reconstruction of Beirut, not in its layout or its appliances, but in its rituals. My mother’s maamoul-making was an act of rebuilding, a way of creating a familiar architecture in an unfamiliar city. She sat on the carpet because that’s how her mother had done it. She used the same wooden moulds she had brought from Lebanon. She insisted on resting the semolina overnight, even when time was tight, because some structures cannot be rushed.

I remember returning from university one year to find her sitting cross-legged on the carpet of our London kitchen, a large bowl of semolina in front of her. She was kneading it with rose water, orange blossom water, and ghee, her hands moving with muscle memory. She covered the dough and left it to rest for twenty-four hours.

“The longer it rests,” she told me, “the more rewarding the taste.”

It was a lesson in patience, but also in inheritance. Some things need time to become themselves.

Maamoul moulds encode a visual language that women have preserved for generations.

Maamoul come in different shapes, but these variations are not arbitrary; they are a form of code, telling you what to expect before you take a bite. A diamond shape signalled a luxurious filling of pistachios, often reserved for guests or special occasions. Domed, mountain-like maamoul held walnuts, a humbler choice. Flat, stamped discs were filled with dates, the most ancient of the three variations. As a child at my grandmother’s house, I learned to read these shapes long before I learned to read words.

Maamoul moulds are also carved with patterns that echo Levantine tile work and ancient motifs. Like my mother’s moulds from Lebanon, they are often passed down through generations, meaning their motifs can take on a particular familial resonance. For families and communities who have been scattered around the earth due to war and conflict, these traditions remind us of the homes and people we left behind. When I press dough into my mother’s moulds, I feel the importance of these legacies, and awed by how a simple pastry can carry history in its geometry.

In Lebanon, maamoul-making is rarely a solitary act. Women gather in groups — sisters, cousins and neighbours — to make hundreds at a time. The work is divided: one person kneads the dough; another prepares the fillings; another shapes the pastries, another bakes. Conversations flow as easily as the rose water. Stories are exchanged, advice is given, grief is shared, laughter fills the room. The labour is heavy, but it is held collectively.

This communal spirit is not incidental. In a region marked by political instability, economic hardship, and repeated cycles of displacement, communal food labour becomes a form of resilience. It is a way of reinforcing social bonds, preserving cultural knowledge, and asserting continuity in the face of rupture.

In the diaspora, this labour often shrinks to the scale of a single household. But when my mother and I make maamoul together in London, we try to ensure that the collective and communicative spirit remains. We recognize that we are supporting a structure that has held our family for decades.

Watching my mother work the dough, I see that diaspora is not just about loss, but also about construction. From fragments — a mould, a scent, a recipe, a memory — we are building new worlds, tethered to those of old. Maamoul is our way of saying: we are still here, and so are the women who shaped us.

These days, at Eid, when I take my first bite, I taste not just pistachios or dates or walnuts, but the entire world that made me.

Lina Saad is a London-based Lebanese food writer and award-winning author of three cookbooks whose work explores heritage, migration, and the cultural memory of food. Through recipes and storytelling, she preserves and celebrates Levantine culinary traditions, with a particular focus on women’s roles in sustaining family, identity, and community across generations. You can find her on Instagram as @alebanesechef.

This week, for our collaborative ‘architecture of food’ issue with chlorophyll magazine, we have a work of magical realism on inconvenient truths by , as well as a poem by on the meaning and making of yogurt. Both pieces were published by chlorophyll and can be read in full on their site. Next week’s essay will be published by FFJ.

The Whistleblower

By Margaux Vialleron

On a western island lived a woman who was said to be older than anyone else. She walked on the balls of her feet, and her hair was as long as she was tall, dyed in green. She spoke in lullabies. She was a healer and a sea forager, grilling clams and oysters for her supper, painting their shells, which she crafted into jewellery before selling the wearables at the weekly market. She was a cold fire whom the islanders had nicknamed Mum. She bothered folks with her unkempt appearance and her memory that never forgot; she was notoriously unforgiving, but she was loved. Mum was good fortune.

Until the morning when a strange man landed on the most western shore of the island. His body was lengthy and bony like a broom, and his hair was straight, thick, and rough, the colour of wheatfields in autumn. Locals nicknamed the solitary lad the Feather Man. He was spotted hovering on the edge of the cliffs often, his gait awkward and near gale speed; birds quarrelled above his head. Everyone in town talked about the Feather Man, but few folks had met him in the flesh…

READ THE REST OF THE STORY ON CHLOROPHYLL.

Margaux Vialleron is a French-born, Glasgow-based interdisciplinary writer. They’re the author of the novels Breaststrokes and The Yellow Kitchen, short stories, and the newsletter The Onion Papers, which explores the various aspects of life, from literature to cooking, language, philosophy and seasonal patterns. Find her at @margauxvlln or margauxvialleron.com.

Culture Club

By Apoorva Sripathi

READ THE REST OF THE POEM ON CHLOROPHYLL.

Apoorva Sripathi is a writer, editor, poet, and artist from Chennai, now based in London. Her projects include shelf offering, an archive of food, art, memory, history, and politics and the grounded report, a repository of her writing, art, and everything else. She is the co-founder and editor of CHEESE, the magazine of culture, and her writing has been published in Kinfolk, Vittles, Wellcome Collection, and Feminist Food Journal. She is also the co-founder and co-editor of chlorophyll.

This week, for our ‘architecture of food’ issue, published in collaboration with chlorophyll magazine, we have an evocative and visceral poem on the ritual, sacrifice, and performance of domestic labour.

ON YOUR HEART / على قلبك

by Hena Mustafa and Nasma Kublawi

like sandpaper on my palm, she slurps water out of cupped hands–
my offering to her before she’s offered to mine.

for mercy, for dignity, and for sanctuary, my back turns to her.
i tease the edge of the blade with my finger,

testing its sharpness, testing your will.
it’s your turn now. hesitation has no place in this process.

did your mother ever teach you how to forage a lamb? did she ever preach
that if you’re okay to chew on her belly, you must be prepared to sever her vein?

now, give her a kiss and repeat after me:
in the name of God, God is greatest,

in the name of all that is delicate, of a blushing bride, and of your clutched pearls,
one swift stroke and a steady arm swords through.

her jugular splits like a pea, her carotid arteries
hemorrhage, and her trachea takes its last heavy breath.

seven seconds only, and her consciousness melts.
three more minutes, and her body is barren.

the hunt and the gather both fall on our plate:
i tie apron strings around your waist, you roll up my sleeves, and

together we smirk at the winnings sprawled on our kitchen marble,
tenderise her flesh in laban and vinegar, let them shelter together in a ziplock bag.

carcass naps in a cool box to be fired only moments before the guests take seats.
we move on to the remainder: herbs to pluck, wicks to trim, aromatics to bloom–

a clean knife dismantles an onion and your tears spill: a moment to grieve,
a scant pause to honor, and we shift our mourning to motion and to bounty.

i finger out the zucchini’s insides, replace them with flesh and root,
submerge them in a broth of bone and bathwater,

stain my wood with sumac and blistered berry,
knuckle the yeast until it springs to genesis,

let pomegranate molasses trickle down the neck of its own bottle,
stick my finger in your pursed lip and ask if it needs more acid,

sing my feminine’s lessons in your ear,
measured only by zeal and gut.

we compose the table, and a pang reminds me of my mama’s warns:
we must architect for abundance, overflow for ease, and let our sacrifice remain unseen.

so i portion out pulverized walnut and pasted red pepper,
another bowl of pulsed lentils, another heaping of crimson,

then i catch a crust of red jabbed beneath my fingernail.
i pick at it, methodical, like a slinging prayer bead, and i let soap censor the kill.

i coat my lashes with ink of peppercorn,
adorn my body with petaled linen, fresh and unsullied,

ready to feast with friends, foes, and foreigns,
welcome the applause, light the match, ladle the celebration,

let their jolly fill our lungs, feel breaths of garlic,
breaths of praise, breaths of one thousand vitalities,

let them suck on the fruit of our invisible labor,
nourish from its sticky, spit the pit into a silver dish.

let the laughs of cigarette smoke ripple the room, let our people gnaw
at the marrow of our efforts, let them tongue its flavor from the ash.

i dip a piece of bread in honeyed blood and earthed oil,
we let the ram, the cheer, and the flattery heal our mortality.

savory swaps for sweet, crumbs brush off laps,
mistica chills the throat, and qahwa seals the eve in warmth.

صحتين. to your health. to your humble, to your refuge.
to her glory, to her return, to our seas.

HENA MUSTAFA (she/her) is a first-generation Palestinian-American lesbian poet and filmmaker. She uses words to create the homeland she craves. Her artistic medium is an attempt to visualize revolution. As the co-founder and brand director of BOYFRIEND co-op, a queer cafe/bar in Brooklyn, Hena fosters a hub for artistic connections and radical organizing within the SWANA community. She has published work in the House Anthology of Queer Poets of Color, and she has headlined performances at Banat El Hara and Kan Yama Kan. Hena’s writing is sensual, textured, and raw.

NASMA KUBLAWI (she/her) is a Palestinian writer and producer. Her poetry has been published in Chicago Quarterly Review, Calliope Art & Literary Magazine, among other platforms, and her short films, MAMA’S FATTEH and ORANGE BLOSSOM, have screened in festivals internationally. She also holds a Master of Social Work from the University of Southern California and practices psychotherapy full-time in New York. Nasma hopes to elevate & illuminate the Arab diaspora through advocacy, the written word, and the moving image. Nasma’s writing is intuitive, rhythmic, and sensory.

Hena and Nasma have been creative collaborators since 2024. Together, their craft and voice explore the ancestral femininity that binds them to their shared homeland. They have performed their works across leftist and Arab spaces in Brooklyn, NY, and are currently developing their chapbook, set for publication in 2027.

This week, for our ‘architecture of food’ issue, we’re sharing both an essay and a poem, which were published by our partner publication chlorophyll. Priceless explores the fascinating history of ladies’ menus, which omitted prices for women diners, while No Catch by Aileen McKay considers changing food practices in the age of technology and urbanization.

You can find short teasers below, and read them in full on chlorophyll’s site.

Priceless by Tien Nguyen

Tien Nguyen is a food and culture writer, an editor at Synonym Magazine, and the co-author of several cookbooks. She lives in Los Angeles.

On a Thursday evening in July 1980, Kathleen Bick and Larry Becker walked into L’Orangerie, an upscale French restaurant in Los Angeles. The two were business partners who’d had some success, so the dinner was to be a celebratory one, her treat. They were handed menus.

The restaurant was expensive, but how expensive, Bick didn’t know, because her menu did not include any prices. Becker’s menu, on the other hand, did. They learned that when men and women dined together, the restaurant gave men menus with prices; women, menus without. According to a discrimination lawsuit Gloria Allred later filed on Bick and Becker’s behalf, this policy ‘caused each of them severe humiliation’, so much so that they left.

When Allred asked L’Orangerie why it had separate menus, Virginie Ferry, who owned the restaurant with her husband Gerard, ironically invoked Gertrude Stein: ‘Because a woman is a woman is a woman.’

Allred’s response: ‘What does that mean, what does that mean, what does that mean?’…

READ THE REST OF THE ESSAY ON CHLOROPHYLL HERE.

No Catch by Aileen McKay

Aileen is a freelance editor and mentor. Her writing has found homes with little living room, From Glasgow To Saturn, Die Zeit, Common Weal, SNACK, Vegan Connections, Cosmofeminism, and Kendal Mountain Festival.

Previous inhabitants of this North Sea
neuk — Highlanders before me —
took quotidian care to use up every part
of their animals: unmeaty bits, too,
all grizzle and ruffage and gleam

swirled with meal and blood, then
sack-stuffed for boiling and boiling…

READ THE REST OF THE POEM ON CHLOROPHYLL HERE.

A classic symbol of sexuality, oysters are even more slippery than they look. Appreciated for tenderness but overlooked in strength, an ecological linchpin yet desired to the point of destruction, they embody the inherent contradictions required for any of us to survive in this changing world.

By Genevieve Bentz

I grew up shucking fresh oysters, only minutes out of the water. When shucking an oyster — leaning your body weight into the blade until it slides deep and far enough for its shell to finally, reluctantly part — it is hard to absorb how delicate they can be, the salty-sweet flesh splayed open, glisteningly alive. But to write them off as vulnerable is folly. These are creatures whose softness makes them tougher than one can imagine.

Our perception of oysters as defenceless perhaps comes from their reputation as the most “feminine” food that we eat, even more so than milk and eggs and chicken breasts. Their undeniable resemblance to the form of female genitalia peppers art from the Earl of Rochester’s “arch’d on both Sides, lay gaping like an Oyster. I had a Tool before me, which I put in / Up to the Quick, and strait the Oyster shut; / It shut and clung to so fast at ev’ry Stroke” to Jan Steen’s “Girl Eating Oysters,” where a young girl blushes at the viewer as she sprinkles a tray of soft wet folds with salt. Come, the painting seems to beckon. Taste this.

Yet beyond this sexualization, oysters are deeply tied to mythical figures and cultural traditions of womanhood, many of them strong and vital. In ancient Greek mythology, Aphrodite emerges, full-figured, from the sea on an oyster shell. Legends tell of mermaids bedecked with glistening pearls. In coastal Japan, Ama still dive in an over 2,000 year-old tradition. And in coastal New England, where I was raised, Native American women have gathered oysters since prehistoric times.

Female elders in tribes like the Mohegan, Wampanoag, and Pequot taught eighteenth-century European settlers to nurture the oyster reefs buttressing the shore from nor-easter tides and hurricane rip-currents. They bent green twigs into hoops, catching oyster larvae that latched and grew from these branches like leaves. Byssal threads and harvest nets stitched together in long, softly swaying lines which wove through the water. The larvae burrowed into the outside of both living and dead shells, anchoring there for the rest of their lives. Their crystals formed mounds of interwoven shells that spiral in three dimensions like tree rings — which, unlike clams or mussels or other deep-cupped mollusks, were edged by a jagged lip.

With the right conditions, a colony could quickly become a living breakwater, shells fusing into an almost impenetrably solid mass. These ragged, mottled, rock-like reefs created storm-stopping friction between angry waves and the smooth sea floor, and could repair themselves after a lashing.

Early colonists got the hang of the practice. Time passed. Bonds hardened. The cycle began again.

Like many precious things, oysters soon fell victim to their very appeal. As with wine or milk or honey, the flavour of an oyster comes from time and place. New England oysters are soft and sweet because beyond Long Island, there is only the empty Atlantic. The unhindered current brings a bright minerality and just enough turbulence from deeper waters, preventing them from becoming too large or tough. Abundant and cheap, easy to store in nets and baskets hung off decks and piers to open whenever convenient, and a tender meat substitute in stuffings and pies as well as stand-alone tavern snack — 19th-century cookbooks from the region include countless oyster recipes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Indigenous communities had farmed oysters on the coasts of the United States for thousands of years without causing a crash in the bivalves’ population. Once refrigeration enabled them to be shipped, voracious harvesting by colonizers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rapidly depleted their stocks. When John Smith explored the Chesapeake Bay in 1706, the oyster reefs were so prominent his ships had to steer around them or risk running aground. Since the early days of oyster harvesting, there have been anxieties over their decline: by the 1760s, laws were in place to attempt to maintain population levels on the east coast. But they failed to stop overfishing, and increases in the coastal human population, industrialization, pollution, and marine traffic have all compounded the death spiral.

Today, local oyster populations are estimated to be at 1-2% of historical levels. This absence has effectively dredged the East Coast and turned once-fortified walls of submerged calcium into soft silt dunes. Reefs are crumbling, and floods are getting worse.

In my hometown of Stonington, Connecticut, my neighbour was the designated town shellfish warden. From the shore, you could see him puttering along foggy coves in a small outboard motorboat, hunched in a bright yellow raincoat, and armed with a flashlight, like an aquatic firefly searching for poachers. Ripples from the blades of his motor would fanned out on the water’s surface in an unmistakable shape — that of a silent, softly growing shell.

When found and wrenched from their colonies, oysters may refuse to go gently down our throats. Growing up in coastal New England, it was hard for me to miss signs dotting the beach after hard rains: “Beds: CLOSED. “Toxic: do not eat.” A salmonella outbreak linked to oysters sickened scores of people across dozens of U.S. states, causing twenty hospitalizations, in 2025. That same year six people died from a “flesh-eating” bacteria after consuming raw Gulf Coast oysters. A woman asks my suburban listserv for help installing a ramp for her now quadriplegic husband. Sepsis. A “lucky oyster.”

In small numbers, oysters are vulnerable to pollution rinsing off the land into the sea. One can filter gallons of water an hour, dutifully processing algae and bacteria that then accumulate on their outer shells or are digested into harmless sediment left behind in the current. But in high enough concentrations, a week, sometimes two, is needed for them to purge the pathogens like e. Coli, vibrio vulnificus, and hepatitis A. When they are overwhelmed, poisoned water pools in their flesh and unmoors the bonds inside of their shells. We contaminate them, and they, in turn, contaminate us.

With oyster populations over-harvested and sickened, surviving colonies are vulnerable to the very floods they are no longer able to help prevent. This cycle is quintessentially American: knowledge stolen from Indigenous communities, then forgotten, now begging to be remembered.

As hurricanes continue to rapidly intensify and travel further north into the United States, paying attention to the plight of oysters offers us a way forward.

The US Navy is tuning in, having created artificial beds to help protect its bases. Meanwhile, the Billion Oyster Project in New York City has restored over 150 million oysters to date, protecting the city from storm damage and providing a safe habitat for hundreds of species. The Oyster Institute is developing new oyster substrates out of vinyl, rip-rap, and 3-D printed concrete to foster new reefs, making sea-hives from hexagonal tubes stacked one on top of another and undulating tile forms. Some feature spheres with holes punched out as if wiffle balls for a giant squid; others are prisms with porous sides that look like the first layer of a plaster cast, webbed threads whispering of future support.

The many Indigenous communities known for careful oystering practices have remained key players in restoration initiatives. The Rappahannock Tribe has developed a mobile aquaculture unit to restore oysters in the Rappahannock watershed, while the Nansemond Indian Nation raises and seeds thousands of oysters in the Chesapeake Bay as part of their tribal commitment to river and waterway stewardship. Andfor individuals who want to get involved in oyster preservation, collecting oyster shells helps new reef construction; states like Maryland will provide equipment, support, and baby oysters for volunteers to grow in cages off docks and piers.

Above all, it would serve us to think harder about the oyster. Its story is one of subversion: while popular culture has immortalized their vulvic form, oysters are actually born male, and can change sex in response to environmental conditions, physiological stressors, or even the reproductive makeup of oysters around them. Some oyster populations have been shown to be able to do this even more than once, proving themselves endlessly adaptable and stubbornly resistant to definition.

The contradictions of oysters remind us how to handle incongruity, to move forward in a warming and storming world. While it was lust that doomed New England’s native reefs — our insatiable appetite for delicate flesh bringing us close to swallowing the species whole — the aphrodisiac oyster reminds us that things can be at once soft and hard, fragile and resilient, independent and communal, an emblem of both grit and beauty.

From the oyster we can learn how to also grow quietly, deliberately, and bravely in the face of potential annihilation. Herein lies their slick truth: while alone we may be fragile, together we might be able to absorb and divert some of the power in the floods to come.

Genevieve Bentz is a lawyer living in Washington, D.C. Her work can be found in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Citron Review, the Nassau Literary Review and on Substack. She has previously worked as a staff writer for the Brooklyn Quarterly and a ghostwriter.

We’re delighted to announce the launch of The Architecture of Food, a joint issue from Feminist Food Journal and chlorophyll magazine. chlorophyll is edited by Apoorva Sripathi (who has also done incredible writing, editing, and illustrating for FFJ over the years) and the wonderful Anne Wallentine.

For this issue, we asked writers to share prose, poetry, and essays about the structures and hierarchies of meals, menus, restaurants, and food systems, and they delivered a compelling array of perspectives. Coming up, we have:

It’s been a pleasure to explore this convergence of great writing in collaboration with chlorophyll, and we hope you enjoy the issue as much as we enjoyed producing it.

We’ll be publishing a new piece from the issue each week over the next few months, alternating between featuring the full piece on FFJ and on chlorophyll. In the weeks where content is not featured on our site, we’ll send a newsletter to direct you to chlorophyll to read the piece in full!

Today’s excellent first essay, launching on chlorophyll, comes from Beth Whelan and explores the significance of ‘meat and two veg’ in the industrial history of Northern England. Check out an excerpt below and read the full piece here.

Meat, Two Veg, and a Side of Comfort

by Beth Whelan | Read it now on chlorophyll

Meat and two veg is often dismissed today as a symbol of culinary monotony, an uninspired beige relic of a British past better left in the rearview mirror. But when I look at a plate of food, I rarely see a lack of imagination, I see my grandad and the fierce, quiet love of the woman who kept him alive. I am 35 years old, born in May 1991. Just two months before I arrived, the heavy iron gates of Agecroft Colliery, a coal mine in Pendlebury, Lancashire, closed for the last time.

My grandad had been an electrical miner there since 1940, navigating the labyrinthine depths of the coalfield for over 50 years. To the world, he was a skilled man, an electrician who crawled through gaps the size of a washing machine door to repair machinery in the damp, explosive darkness. To his family, he was the provider who carried the silent weight of the 1974 strikes, a time when he chose to cross the picket lines and accept the label of ‘scab’ to ensure his wife and three young children didn’t go hungry. That choice was made at the kitchen table, and it was the women of the north who ensured that the table remained a sanctuary.

If I ask any of my Welsh or southern friends who the best cook they know is, they’ll say their mum. But among my friends who grew up in the north, they’ll say anyone else…

Read the rest of this essay here and stay tuned for next week’s piece on FFJ.

Saying goodbye to CELEBRATE

Our CELEBRATE issue has officially come to an end! Over the last four months, we’ve explored celebration from myriad angles: as cultural practice, as a political tool, as a hedonistic expression, as community-building, and self-care.

CELEBRATE’s full lineup included:

• Takeaway: The Politics of Nigerian Party Food by Tracy Egbele (with an audio reading for paid subscribers)

• Dinner is Potluck: Celebrating Queerness at the Communal Table by Nina Katz (with an audio reading for paid subscribers)

• Kyiv Cakes, Baklava Buns, and Welcome to London: The Bakers Using Sweet Treats and Sisterhood as an Antidote to Violence by Riana Austin

• Architecting Joy and Pleasure: “Life is ferment battle struggle joy torment” by Clare Michaud (originally published in Beurrage)

• Here’s to Still Being Alive: A Transfemme Thanksgiving in a Time of Fear by Lira Green

• The Jews Who Ate Pork ‘Till The Pigs Were Called: What the Contemporary Left Can Learn from Yiddish Anarchist Organizing by Jesse Roth

• Telegram From Jupiter: Dancing Through the End of the World by Isabela Bonnevera

• Resetting the Table (For One): Learning to Dine Companionably at the Solo Table by Candice Chung (with an audio reading for paid subscribers)

The issue was accompanied by vibrant pencil-on-paper illustrations by the multi-hyphenate Apoorva Sripathi, and several pieces have audio readings (done by the authors themselves) available for our paid subscribers.

We truly couldn’t be prouder of the calibre of writing featured in this issue, and we encourage you to revisit anything you might have missed. Next up will be our ‘architecture of food’ issue in collaboration with chlorophyll magazine, launching very soon.

A new way to support FFJ

If you enjoyed CELEBRATE, we’d love for you to consider supporting FFJ within your means. For those who aren’t ready to commit to a full Substack subscription, we’ve set up a new PayPal donation page where you can send even just a dollar or two our way.

There are almost 5,000 of you here now, so everyone giving just a little would make a huge difference. We run FFJ as volunteers, and our main concern is being able to pay our writers fairly! If our work has meant something to you, we’d be really grateful if you considered contributing.

Donate now

With gratitude,

FFJ

If you enjoyed this issue, consider becoming a paid FFJ supporter — which includes audio readings like the one done here by Candice, and free access to our FFF events.

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By Candice Chung for our CELEBRATE issue | Editing supported by Austin Romeo | Paid subscribers have access to an audio reading of this piece on our podcast.

I took the flat because of the breakfast island. It had a wide, mock-granite top with tiny opalescent flecks visible only up close. If you stared at it long enough, the speckled surface had the hypnotic effect of the night sea, which was surprisingly soothing. I told my sister about this feature on her first visit.

“This is a kitchen island,” she said.

“What?”

“Or a breakfast bar,” she turned, eager to see the rest of the place. “Why do you keep calling it a breakfast island?”

Somehow, my mind had jumbled the words and found a name that felt truer. At the time, I was reading British author Emma Forrest’s memoir, in which she described her late-night visits to a soul food diner after a bad breakup. The pecan pancakes saw her through the long hours she couldn’t sleep. “Breakfast all day is like hope,” she wrote. “A fresh start at midnight.” A part of me must’ve hoped that living with a breakfast island would offer similar reprieve.

That summer, I had separated from my partner — someone with whom I’d built a home and shared an island-less kitchen for the past 13 years. We’d met not long after I graduated from university, our lives woven together by a daisy chain of rites of passage: first jobs, first overseas trips, first fantasies of pets and houseplants with ironic names. Ours was a life of addition, thick with objects and memories even as our relationship waned. At 36, I walked away from our inner-city home and found myself living alone for the first time. It was a milestone neither of us had anticipated.

“Where would you put a dining table?” my sister asked.

It was a small, split-level studio within my rental budget. There was enough room for a bed, a desk, a bookshelf, and a two-seater couch I’d taken custody of from my ex-partner, but not much else.

I told my sister the island would be sufficient. After all, there was no one else I needed to serve but me. We opened a bottle of room temperature wine and toasted to my new, tableless existence. I was thrilled at a future of lightness — a fantasy of needing nothing, no one.

In Practicalities, Maguerite Duras wrote that a house once meant “a family house” —its singular challenge: “how to provide a centre for children and men at one and the same time.” For Duras, the house a woman creates is a “utopia”. Though look closer, she warned, and you will find a precarious foundation: “She knows it’s safer…to be interested in other people’s happiness than to believe in [her] own.”

But if the family house felt like entrapment to Duras, cooking — specifically, cooking alone — seemed to return a kind of freedom. She wrote of the early afternoon hours at her home in Neauphle-le-Château, when her husband and children were out and she had the entire space to herself, how it was an utterly private feeling that reminded her of the act of writing. “To enter that silence was like entering the sea,” she wrote. “At once a happiness and a very precise state of abandonment to an evolving idea…slowly and carefully, so as to make it last, I’d cook.”

In the first few months in my new home, I celebrated my own sprawling freedom by cooking whenever I could. I learnt to make perfect soft-boiled eggs and a proper miso soup; I mastered 15-minute noodle salads and quick-pickles. I tried every “one-pot” recipe with the cheap pots and pans I’d amassed, eager to rebuild my life and budget with a breathtaking reserve of pasta and chickpeas.

But on some nights after the cooking was done, a jet lag-like feeling would beset me. I’d find myself perched at the breakfast island, my bare feet dangling from one of the two tall stools. I’d arrived at the part of the evening when the drama was over — the question of what to make and how to make it now resolved — the part where I had felt useful. Afterwards, my dinner seemed unreal, like props in a stage set. The plain white IKEA plates, from a 16-piece dinner set, marketed at the nuclear family, felt absurd and nondescript. I’d clean up immediately after each meal, as if erasing evidence of my presence.

“A table means does it not my dear it means a whole steadiness,” writes Gertrude Stein in Tender Buttons. It occurred to me that while I yearned for a new life of lightness — of subtraction — I had not yet learnt how to feel grounded in my own kitchen. All it took was a bad night to feel like an imposter, daring to ‘play house’ alone.

In Italian, there is a saying, A tavola non s’invecchia: “At the table one never grows old”. It describes the vital, joy-filled spirit when one eats a meal at a shared table. A table that means. But in the quiet of my kitchen, I’d sometimes feel stuck in a non-time. Adrift between two eras of my life.

Despite these reservations in the home, I’d always felt content with my own company outside. My work as a food journalist often meant eating and travelling alone. In a restaurant, solitude feels not only familiar but sometimes necessary, and the distance makes it possible to observe, clarify and take in subtle details. Then there are the lone diners who have always loomed large in my imagination: the quiet, enigmatic figures in Haruki Murakami’s novels; Edward Hopper’s contemplative Automat; the roving, bleary-eyed diner meals of Stephen Shore’s 1970s American Surfaces photo series, and the promise of Hemingway’s exacting search for a clean, well-lighted place.

Perhaps it is no surprise that the kind of solo dining we romanticize tends to take place outside the home. In a moody, dimly lit restaurant, we see a stranger cutting a solitary figure at the table, unbothered by onlookers’ gazes. The subtext being: here is someone so self-contained they choose their own company over mindless chatter, so at ease with the business of desire that they find it perfectly natural to seek out what they want; someone so comfortable with their own appetite it makes you contemplate your own.

Throughout history, men have occupied these positions of fantasy — the erotics of owning one’s cravings in public. When I dine out alone, it is true that I experience my own solitude in the public space as a small act of rebellion, an unspoken thrill.

Above all, I relish the joy of being a regular. At a late-night Japanese restaurant that I liked to visit after work, the owner would often usher me to my usual spot with no more than a smile and a quick nod. No one ever asked if I was expecting anyone else. There, I would take my seat by the wide sushi bar where I could watch the chef work. I loved hearing the day’s special, being told of ‘what’s good’, then promptly left alone with a large glass of wine and soon after, my meal. It was easy to relax into that kind of comfort, in the company of strangers, where nothing was asked of me.

Perhaps this is what Gertrude Stein means by a table’s “whole steadiness”. I had a place in that restaurant — somewhere that was hospitable to my solitude, my wants and needs. But I was yet to feel this whole steadiness at home; the small family of IKEA plates stayed indolent, unsure of their place at a table where only I gathered.

In truth, it isn’t just a restaurant’s hospitality that draws me in. I appreciate the way these ‘third spaces’ refuse to hang on to memories — the way they reset with a clean slate every few hours, with every meal. I’ve found that our food rituals at home, on the other hand, expose us to a vulnerability of a different kind. In the privacy of our homes, we can be haunted by ghosts of dinner tables past.

In her essay collection Aftermath, Rachel Cusk recalls that post-divorce, she took to carrying her daughters’ food to them on a tray. The family table, a place where they once celebrated togetherness, became unbearable. With no real function anymore, it was slowly covered with papers and books and electricity bills. “I try to remember what our family meals were like, and though the detail escapes me, I remember it as a kind of tree, nourishment, with all of us fastened to its branches, as indistinguishable as fruit,” she writes.

In theory, there is no better place to let our guard down than at home. But what happens when mealtime memories make it hard to relax on command? Or worse, make us feel like we need to rein in our appetite for pleasure — in case it opens the floodgate to other hungers?

I remember the way my partner and I used to come back together after a fight. How it was always easier to forgive each other at the dinner table — with or without words — because that was how it was done at our respective childhood homes. At the table, the past and present coalesced. We would find ourselves slipping back into character, playing the parts we both knew, rehearsing a future that was already imagined for us, even as our dreams and ambitions had shifted. Like Cusk and her family, we were fastened to our own tree of domesticity. I had once tried making a home as a joint project, with mealtime as the beating heart. Was I ready to imagine a different kind of nucleus?

In a 2024 lecture titled “Setting the Table, Some Reflections on Why Tables Matter”, intersectional feminist scholar Sara Ahmed invited thinkers and activists to interrogate the symbolic identity of the kitchen table. Ahmed highlighted that while a table is often thought of as a place of togetherness in the home — where stories, appetites and domestic labour converge — there are important reasons to challenge our relationship to it.

“The expression ‘turn the table’ can mean to change a situation, often by reversing a power dynamic,” said Ahmed. “Kitchen tables have many uses, including queer uses. By queer uses, I mean how things or spaces can be used in ways that were not intended or by those for whom they were not intended.”

Here, Ahmed refers to the art and philosophy born of various dinner tables, but she is also encouraging us to lay claim to pleasure, to stretch out and take up space both socially and creatively. For in the end, isn’t “domestic bliss” still imagined with a male gaze? Was it any surprise that we would feel out of place in a solo household if we can only picture rest and refuge with lovers or family?

Ahmed’s invitation to queer the domestic table reminded me of another line from Gertrude Stein: “A table means necessary places and/ a revision a revision of a little/ thing it means it does mean that there has been a stand, a stand/ where it did shake.” The challenge, I realized, wasn’t just how or what we cook — but how to dine companionably in the domestic space with ourselves.

By the second year of living on my own, I had moved to a new flat, the lease of my breakfast island loft having run out. I was now eating all my meals at a kidney-shaped coffee table, but I was charmed by the sunny living room and a view of adjoining rooftops, which lent the apartment’s flaws — its even smaller floor space and the tiny kitchenette — a vaguely Parisian edge.

It was while living in this flat that I encountered the work of Judith Jones, a publishing luminary best known for championing Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which propelled her to fame and many modern cooks’ bookshelves. But it was Jones’s interview on solo cooking that led me to her own visionary book, The Pleasures of Cooking for One.

In Pleasures, Jones describes how, widowed at 72, she found herself plunged into a world of rules and etiquette that made little sense to her. “Once, years ago, I was in a supermarket, and they had only these giant heads of broccoli,” she said in an interview about her book. “I broke off one stalk and took it to the cashier, who told me I had to pay for the whole head. I was humiliated.”

There was something about the flash of embarrassment she described at the store that struck a chord with me. Instantly, I recognized my own wariness of having my domestic habits put on display: the fear that any missteps might be seen as evidence of much deeper fault lines in my life — the old imposter syndrome of being a single woman ‘playing house’. In the interview, she touched on questions that were beginning to feel vital to me. Why did supermarkets sell things in portions that were insurmountable to single people? Who taught us not to go into any trouble for ourselves? What was so strange about wanting less – or more?

In that moment, I felt a flicker of resonance with Jones’s determination to keep showing up, despite society’s insistence we shrink away. In the aftermath of her husband’s death, Jones wasn’t sure if she would ever enjoy preparing a meal for herself or eating alone at home. After all, they had been lifelong cooking and travelling companions, living through almost 50 years of marriage that yielded thousands of shared meals.

But as it turned out, she was wrong. “Instead, I realized that the ritual we had shared together…was a part of the rhythm of my life,” Jones writes. While some people dread the idea of returning to an empty house after a day’s work, dinner time for Jones was something she looked forward to and carved out as a space for creativity.

“More than ever I found myself, about mid-afternoon, letting my mind drift toward what I was going to conjure up for dinner when I got home,” she wrote. “I can’t wait to bring [the kitchen] to life, to fill it with good smells, to start chopping or whisking or tossing and smelling up my hands with garlic. I turn on some music and have a glass of Campari or wine, and it is for me the best part of the day.”

With dinner ready, Jones would arrange her dish with care and ferry it to a table set with a single cloth napkin in a family napkin ring, adorned with a bottle of wine and candles waiting to be lit — cultivating a luxurious domestic intimacy just for herself.

From then on, I started setting a place for myself at home when I ate. Those 30-seconds spent on clearing the table and laying out cutlery never clashed with my work or life plans — making it technically impossible to label my new habit ‘indulgent’, as it was clearly not just free but extremely efficient to look forward to a meal.

I used the thick, floral napkins I bought on my travels as placemats, instead of saving them for guests. I put away the IKEA family dining set and ate with mismatched plates or crockery which I’d found in thrift stores, and whose origin stories in my home no one else knew — like the wide, flat bowl I regularly served my dinner in that was once intended to be a fruit bowl.

The simple act of setting a place for one reminded me of a ritual I grew up with. When dinner was ready, Mum or Dad would ask my sister and me to ‘開枱’, a Cantonese term that translates directly to ‘opening the table’, meaning to get ready to eat.

I realized part of the loneliness of solitary dining was our exile from familiar rituals, and the sense of occasion that came from them. I saw Jones’s place-setting as a way to gently lay claim to that pleasure; her refusal to give up a simple, quotidian formality felt like a kind of anti-etiquette in a world where single people are expected to live with stoic efficiency. Who’s to say we shouldn’t enjoy the same anticipation created by a well-plated dish, served with care and flourish?

Of course, Jones knew more than anyone that throwing a good party meant taking the chance that things can, and will, often go wrong. Importantly, dinnertime alone need not be a thing of uncompromising joy or manic enthusiasm. I learnt that it’s fine to have nights when I show up to the kitchen feeling fed up and prickly, not in the mood to eat well or play host; or that I can enjoy dining on my own and still crave having someone to cook for from time to time. As Jones wrote, “Of course, we want to share with others, too, but we don’t always have family and friends round. And I can’t see taking in my neighbours every night.” For in the end, a fine solitary meal is also about sitting well with the longings which pleasure inevitably brings.

Since then, I have served dozens of meals for one, first at the kidney-shaped coffee table in that small studio, and in the subsequent homes that have followed. I make tacos for one and elaborate late breakfasts, I fry an extra egg on whatever I was eating if I need extra comfort, just like my mum would for us if she saw that we were glum. I take photos of the photo-worthy dishes. Not to share online, but as a private reminder that I have been cared for and fed well.

I once read that in Ancient Egypt, there was a ritual called ‘The Year of Eating’, in which the new bride and groom tested their compatibility not just in the bedroom, but in the way they ate together at the dinner table, after which they either stayed together or parted ways. I love the idea that companionable dining isn’t a given, but a lifetime’s experiment — and one need not have a partner to participate. When I set a table for myself, I feel part of the quiet celebration of the ebb and flow of life: the ever-shifting tides of being the carer to the cared for, guest to host, the loving to the beloved.

Candice Chung is an author and a Creative Writing lecturer at the University of Glasgow. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, BBC Radio, The Scotsman, The Sydney Morning Herald, Good Food and more. Her debut memoir CHINESE PARENTS DON’T SAY I LOVE YOU is named a LoveReading Best Book of 2025 and a Financial Times Best Summer Book of 2025.

Editor’s note: If you liked this piece, you’ll love the forthcoming The Spinster Cookbook: Culture, Politics and Pleasure in the Single Woman’s Kitchen by Eli Davies. It’s a beautiful and informative ode to the challenges of navigating a society built for nuclear families as a single woman, and we absolutely loved reading it — now available for pre-order from the Indigo Press.

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I’ve been at the club for 20 hours when I decide to make one last trip down to the main floor. I pull my earplugs out of my pocket and stuff them into my ears; the back left speaker is thumping. Immediately I run into my friend E. just in front of it. He hands me a Chupa-Chup, dropping to one knee and offering it as if it’s an engagement ring. I laugh and accept. He first gave me a lollipop in the toilet queue on my birthday, and after running into him again a few weeks prior at a dinner party, he’d promised to bring me another one this Sunday — it’s become our little thing. He asks how my night is going and I ask about his, taking my earplugs out and putting them back into my pocket before they’ve even had a chance to settle into my eardrums. Talking to anyone with them in makes me feel like I’m drowning.

It’s a cold night in November, two weeks since the 2024 US presidential election. A heavy air hangs over the already-dark Berlin winter. But as soon as I step past the building’s door my chest feels a bit lighter. Viel Spaß, the bag checker says to me as he passes back my bag, items in disarray after his thorough search. As I change my pants for a miniskirt in the garderobe it strikes me what a privilege it is to be able to dedicate a Sunday to having fun.

The building — its quiet corners, angsty toilet queues, packed dance floors — is a mirror. When I find my surroundings unsettling, it’s an opportunity to sit with a part of my heart that isn’t at home. But tonight everything sparkles. Time folds onto itself, the equivalent of two working days passing by in a blink. Baby hairs slick with sweat against my forehead as I dance with A., mesmerized by their blood-red beret. At 4:08 a.m — four hours into a closing set by Cormac I’ve been eagerly waiting for— I pull out my Notes app. By this point in the journey, my vocal cords are often strained and so I resort to communicating in writing. I tap out a message that I then wave in front of the faces of my two current dance floor companions.

Neither of them seems to understand why I’m writing about Republicans. To be fair, the link is opaque, but to my blissed-out mind it makes total sense. All this hate, when you could choose to have this much love.

I’ve received news alerts in the club before and it’s always a strange dissonance, like receiving a telegram from Jupiter when you’re living on Mars. Fadi Mohem was playing in the garden when I suddenly received one from every news app on my phone that Joe Biden had stepped aside. I tapped a friend from Texas on the shoulder, showed them the message. “We’ll always remember where we were when we saw this news,” they say, even though I think both of us know deep down that there is no good to come from either side of the aisle.

Back on the November dance floor, realizing my friends won’t grasp the significance of what I’m trying to convey, I laugh to myself and tuck my phone back into my bag and don’t touch it again for hours. To my left, I see the same person I saw in front of the DJ booth at Cormac’s last set, the same day I first kissed a woman in public for absolutely nobody’s pleasure but my own.

R. leans in and tells me she wants a prosecco cranberry, so we go to the bar then venture back to the dance floor, following each other through the thinning crowd like penguins. A strobe flashes over S. at the exact moment that she lights a joint. I think to myself that she looks beautiful. I catch her eye and she catches mine. I jokingly use my fingers like a picture frame and take a mental snap.

Cormac finishes his set with There Must Be an Angel by Eurythmics.

The blinds open. Everyone looks so beautiful bathed in the unusually keen winter sun. I love the idea that in an hour’s time, a good chunk of these dancers will be rolling bleary-eyed into offices around the city, fighting to stay awake through Monday meetings. I fold my plastic fan, stuff it into my waistband, and use both hands to rummage through my bag to find R. a cigarette. I put it in her mouth and light it for her.

A moment in time and when I close my eyes in the backseat of the taxi home, it already feels like a dream.

A month later, back home in Barcelona, I’m on the metro with O. and H., in town from Berlin for a warmer New Year’s Eve. As we steady ourselves around a pole, I see the woman seated in front of us is crying, hard. She looks so alone, so sad, that for a second I’m overwhelmed by the desire to distract her. I rummage in my bag and come up with the Chupa-Chup given to me in front of the speaker by E., which I’d been saving for a sugar hit.

Don’t do it, O. and H. shake their heads, sure that by offering it to her, I’ll make her feel worse. Quite a masculine way of wanting to be seen in the world, I think to myself; the idea that having your pain acknowledged by the world is a sign of weakness, that leaking into your surroundings signals an unbecoming porousness. When the crying woman looks up, I search for her gaze and smile and hold my hand out with the lollipop in it. She takes it and smiles back. Two stops later, she gets off with my small relic of that November night; I’m happy that it has the chance to live on, hoping that it will make the rest of her day just a tiny bit sweeter. All this hate, when you could choose to have this much love.

Isabela Bonnevera is a founding editor of Feminist Food Journal.

Alex and I go way back — she was the first person I spoke to at the initiation day of our Master’s program in 2015 — and it’s been beyond exciting to see what she and Canelle are creating with Project Coven, which officially launched late last year. They highlight women-made wines through shared storytelling on Instagram, host small tasting gatherings, often in collaboration with wine shops and restaurants led by underrepresented groups, and eventually, hope to maintain a living database of women winemakers to make discovery easier and more accessible. The ultimate goal is to create an inclusive, curiosity-driven space where conversations around wine, feminism, and regenerative food systems can unfold, and to build visibility and community around the women driving the natural wine industry forward.

Today’s interview traces their personal journeys into low-intervention winemaking, the founding of Project Coven, and the motivation behind their mission to amplify women in a traditionally male-dominated industry. It also dives into the possibility for natural wine to be not just a product but a cultural and political practice which embodies queer, feminist, and agroecological values. We hope you enjoy it!

-Isabela

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Reply acronyms: AK (Alex Khripko); CM (Canelle Mengual); PC (singular response by Project Coven)

Isabela: I’m so excited to have you both here to chat about your new project! Before we get into it, can you tell me a bit about your personal and professional backgrounds?

AK: I was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and immigrated to Toronto at the age of five.

After completing my Bachelor’s of Public Affairs in Ottawa, I moved to Berlin for my Master’s of Public Policy at the Hertie School, focusing on gender diplomacy and international relations. I then began working in the climate and energy sector after graduating, primarily with startups and cross-sector innovation initiatives globally at the German Energy Agency (where I met and worked with Canelle on the same team!)

Over an almost-ten year career, I grew increasingly frustrated about how often equity, diversity, and justice were overlooked in a sector preaching a better future. In some ways, I felt like we were losing the plot. We’re seeing in real time that climate innovation doesn’t automatically translate into universal prosperity, and I wanted my work to reflect that reality.

After leaving my climate tech job last year, I decided to channel my energy into addressing this through Bloom Climate Studio, as an independent consultant helping organisations design more grounded, effective & inclusive climate innovation programmes.

In between this career pivot, I was lucky enough to spend a couple of weeks doing wine harvests at two different women-owned (Glow Glow, Soma Vines), low-intervention vineyards in western Germany (grape picking, pressing, preparing for fermentation, bottling,etc). This solidified my already-growing desire to start a project amplifying women making and working in natural wine, having already completed my first level of WSET (Wine & Spirits Trust), and doing a Climate Farm School course focused on regenerative practices in 2023.

CM: I grew up in a rural area just outside Paris, close to the Champagne region and its vineyards. As a child, I spent most of my time outdoors, surrounded by animals. That early intimacy with nature stayed with me, even as I moved through cities and institutions. I studied Applied Foreign Languages and International Business at Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée, spent a year at Lehman College in New York City, and eventually earned a Master’s in Marketing and Strategy from Université Paris Dauphine – PSL.

As a teenager, I briefly bought into the consumerist and capitalistic dream, but soon realized it wasn’t fulfilling. I knew I needed something more: a way to have a positive impact on society. That thread runs through my career. I started in marketing and communications with organizations like Lemonaid & ChariTea, then joined Alex at the German Energy Agency (dena) working on Start Up Energy Transition, connecting innovators pushing against the fossil fuel status quo. Today, as an Impact Manager at Phineo gAG, I support nonprofit organizations to increase their positive impact on society.

Over time and through the experiences, I noticed a gap in the mainstream sustainability and feminist movements: a lack of intersectionality. I began to see how systems of oppression are interconnected and realized I needed to connect the dots to rethink them. This perspective led me to co-found Reclaim, a Berlin-based ecofeminist organization working at the intersection of gender justice and climate protection. For five years, we’ve organized an annual one-day event where people can come together, create, and engage.

Now, I’m taking that same spirit of connection and regeneration into a new chapter: co-founding a natural wine project in Berlin with Alex! It feels like a return to my roots — bringing together people, nature, and community in a way that honours the land and the people who work it.

Isabela: What first attracted you to the world of natural wine?

AK: I generally got into wine in my early-mid 20s due to my dad, who got into scouting out amphora wines from Georgia or finding the best subscription boxes available in Ontario. Every time I visited home, he’d be excited to share a wine he found with me and it was and still is one of our connection points.

Natural wine came into my life a little later, and my first experiences with it weren’t the greatest. I happened to stumble across the more extreme, funky expressions from the early days, when many European winemakers were just beginning to transition toward low-intervention methods. It was a period of heavy experimentation, and the results were, at times, decidedly strange. However, the (re)emergence of natural winemaking continued to develop exponentially over the last years, and after trying some really amazing, expressive natural wines, it was really hard to go back to drinking conventional wine.

During this time, I also went to a lot of natural wine tastings and began learning more and more about the stark (and shocking) differences between natural and conventional wine production. This realization also pushed my professional interests further into the regenerative, nature-based side of things within the wide climate realm.

Especially after taking part in wine harvests in western Germany, I really began to notice the community, the collective, which manifests itself around regenerative wine production. Whether it was winemakers lending a hand to their peers in the final sprint of their harvest, or the chefs coming in from the city to cook for the harvest team, it was really beautiful, really special.

So then, after talking about doing something in this space for what felt like years (to the likely annoyance of my friends), we started Project Coven.

CM: Growing up, wine was always on the table, first conventional, then organic. My parents instilled in me a deep sense of responsibility regarding what I consume. We were the “organic freak” family, though back then, it was not about natural wine.

Ten years ago, when I moved to Germany, I discovered the white wines of the Rheingau, where my partner’s family lives. Walking through those vineyards and working the harvest gave me a profound appreciation for the work behind the fruit. It was then that I began to dive deeper into winemaking, fascinated by the process and life and stories of the makers. That’s when I started drinking natural wine and fell in love with it.

The taste reminded me of the Cidre Brut from my childhood in Brittany. But what resonated even more was the mindset behind it: it is all about the collective. This is why I’m bothered when natural wine is only seen as a hype or a luxury for superficial drinkers. It’s the opposite. Natural wine is a return to the roots of how we made wine before the industrial era. It is about simplicity.

In French regions like the Ardèche, natural wine isn’t a trendy label or a luxury item. There, you see small-scale farmers, often women leading the way, who reject the industrial, extractive model that treats land, animals and people as resources to be exploited. Instead, they practice a form of agriculture that is deeply relational: listening to the soil, working with the seasons, and valuing community over profit.

As an ecofeminist, this is the ultimate alignment. It’s a rejection of a system that seeks to dominate nature and a choice to live in partnership with it — to honour it.

Isabela: The conventional wine world is heavily male-dominated. What is the state of women and LGBTQ2+ representation in natural wine? How has this evolved over the years?

PC: The conventional wine world has long been male-dominated, and natural wine isn’t entirely exempt from that reality, but based on our conversations and initial research, there does seem to be a meaningfully higher presence of women in the natural wine space compared to conventional. That said, they’re still the minority, and there’s a pattern worth noting: women are often not the front face of the brand, with many occupying admin or back-office roles rather than being positioned as the winemaker or figurehead.

That’s slowly changing, though. There’s a growing number of initiatives dedicated to highlighting and celebrating women in natural wine, with books like We Don’t Want Any Crap in Our Wine by Camilla Gjerde and professional collectives like the Female Wine Collective in Austria helping bring more collective organisation and visibility to the women who are shaping this world. It feels like the natural wine community, with its generally more progressive ethos, is at least more open to that conversation than the conventional side.

As for LGBTQ2+ representation, it’s honestly something we’re still exploring ourselves. It doesn’t yet seem to be as prominent a public conversation within natural wine, but there’s definitely a real subculture there and it’s something we’re excited to help support.

Isabela: You recently co-launched Project Coven, a collective to champion women winemakers. What motivated you to get this going, and what are you hoping to achieve?

PC: Project Coven came from recognizing a gap that felt impossible to ignore mixed with a thought of “where can we best put our skills to work here?”. There are women making incredible natural wines, but they’re often not the ones being talked about, featured, or discovered. We wanted to change that by creating a dedicated platform and community to amplify women-made natural wine.

In practice, that looks like shared storytelling on Instagram, small tasting gatherings hosted in collaboration with wine shops and restaurants led by underrepresented voices, and longer term, building out a living database of women winemakers to make discovery easier and more accessible. But beyond the practical, we’re also trying to create a genuinely inclusive, curiosity-driven space where conversations around wine, feminism, and regenerative food systems can happen openly and inspire something bigger. We like to say that the natural wine part is sometimes a ‘gateway’ to getting people more interested in regeneration.

Isabela: How does intersectionality factor into your work?

PC: Intersectionality is central to how we think about this work. Supporting women in natural wine means nothing if it only centers one kind of woman. We’re already building that into how we operate, whether that’s who we collaborate with, who we choose to feature, or how we design our events. We’re also committed to learning from and working alongside BIPOC and queer collectives already doing this work, to understand where Project Coven can genuinely add support as the platform grows.

For example, Lauren Johnson-Wünsche, a wine and food writer here in Berlin runs a 300+ member Black Berlin Women Wine Group. That kind of community building is exactly the spirit we want to be in mutual support with.

Isabela: Let’s talk a little bit about the synergies between natural wine and agroecology. How does natural wine production differ from conventional production in terms of climate and environmental impacts?

PC: The synergies are deep, and honestly undersold in most conversations about natural wine. At its core, natural wine is simply how wine was made for most of its 8,000-year history. The mix included grapes, wild yeasts, minimal intervention, and a winemaker working patiently with their land. Back then, no lab yeasts, synthetic pesticides, or additives to correct color or texture were used. That also applies to the standardized flavor profiles we know today (meaning for example, with the right mix of additives, i.e lactic acid, you can make a French Chardonnay taste exactly like one you’d find in Napa Valley). With natural wine, the drink tasted like its home, and every year tasted a little different.

Of course, the 20th century changed all of that. Just like other commodities, as wine became a global product rather than a local tradition, industrial methods took over: synthetic pesticides and herbicides, cultured yeasts for uniform flavor, 49-plus additives in some conventional bottles, heavy filtration and stabilization to ensure consistency at scale.

The goal shifted to efficiency, uniformity, and mass profit stability and in that process, wine became fundamentally disconnected from its land, its labour, and its ecology. Even the mechanical harvesting techniques used in traditional industry, though time-saving, compact soil and bruises vines in ways that quietly degrade the land over time (and take all the living beings living in the wines with it).

Natural wine, by contrast, is a return to something older and more ecologically honest. Land stewardship, biodiversity, transparency, and a relationship with the land rather than extraction from it. And we think that’s where the agroecology connection becomes so clear: both are rooted in the same principle that farming systems should work with natural processes, not override them.

Isabela: As you highlight, natural wine-making uses techniques that are very close to nature (no lab-made yeasts, no additives, etc). Yet — as we can both attest to, having lived in cities like Berlin and Barcelona — natural wine bars are often exclusive spaces that appeal to a certain global aesthetic and sensibility. How do you explain this contradiction?

PC: Ouf, it’s a real contradiction, and one we’re very much aware of and honestly concerned about. The principles underpinning natural wine are fundamentally anti-capitalist: working with the land, rejecting industrial systems, preserving traditions that prioritize ecology over profit. At its core, natural wine is for the people. It has always been.

But then obviously the market responded to the opportunity rather than the ethos, and that’s where things got complicated. The spaces natural wine became associated with were often designed to differentiate, to carve out a niche that was neither old money Veuve Clicquot on the Ku’damm nor your local dive bar, but something else entirely. And in doing so, they created their own kind of exclusivity. There’s a whole aesthetic that developed around it which we all know and probably succumb to as well… the orange wine, the olives in metal industrial bowls, the sourdough and butter, the Instagram-ready corner table. Ironically, a lot of these spaces that were trying to stand out ended up looking exactly the same.

At the same time, as with other fairly produced products, there’s also a real and legitimate tension around price. If you’ve ever worked a natural wine harvest, you understand pretty quickly why a bottle can’t honestly cost three euros. That kind of pricing only works if you’re squeezing the land, the workers, and the soil itself. Regenerative, low-intervention farming is labor-intensive, lower-yield and higher-risk by design. So some of the cost is real and justified. But that doesn’t mean the cultural gatekeeping or hip aesthetics around it are.

What gives us hope is that this isn’t the universal story. In parts of France, for example, natural wine isn’t a statement, it’s just what’s on the menu next to the beer, in unpretentious countryside bars and neighborhood spots in Paris where it’s simply normalized rather than sensationalized. That’s what we want it to be everywhere, because only then, with mass public acceptance, does the natural wine industry move out of its somewhat niche and pretentious status. Just to hammer home: the aesthetic capture of natural wine is a market phenomenon, not an inherent truth about what it is or who it’s for.

Isabela: I like that, because at the same time, we do see that many natural wine bars are proudly queer or women/femme-owned. How does natural wine embody feminist and queer values?

PC: In more ways than we could ever fully list. To start with the uncomfortable truth: women, LGBTQ+ and BIPOC people still face very real sexism, racism, and homophobia across the entire wine chain, from the vineyard to the bar. And while many conventional wine spaces do try to source interesting, quality-driven wines, the ethical rootedness that is quietly expected of natural wine production doesn’t tend to travel with them. That’s not to say every natural winemaker, distributor, or bar is actively embodying these values. But there’s an underlying current there, an expectation of integrity that perhaps creates a sense of safety and belonging for historically underrepresented groups.

There’s also something deeper at play. Natural wine, at its core, is a movement of resistance to mass industrialisation and ecological destruction. And it feels entirely coherent that a movement pushing back against the capitalist, largely male-led, over-extraction of land would find common ground with communities who have long been resisting the same structures of dominance and extraction. The oppressors, if you want to put it plainly, tend to overlap.

That’s actually part of why we named this Project Coven. The history of witches and witchcraft is really a history of the persecution of women, queer people, healers, and anyone who fell outside the white male colonialist status quo. People who had deep relationships with land, with plants, with community knowledge, and were punished for it in various ways. That lineage felt very relevant to us.

Isabela: Any winemakers whose work you particularly want to highlight?

PC: Our first interview series we did was with Šárka Betke, founder of Vinofactum, a distributor of Eastern European wines in Berlin. As of the last two years, she is also a winemaker herself, making wine in the village of Kobylí in the Czech Republic under The Lacery. She originally comes from a winemaking family in this village, making the choice to work with her native land a natural way to honor her roots. Though she took quite the indirect route to get there, with a career in tech across Europe and Asia, before pivoting to the wine world in Berlin and eventually finding her way back to the soil she grew up around. As she explained in one of our interviews, she founded Vinofactum to put Eastern European natural wines back on the global map and dismantle the misguided assumption that Eastern European = low quality.

Then there’s the incredible Maryam Hariri of Azizam Wines, who, after a global career in climate policy, decided to make natural wine in Baja, Mexico. She launched Azizam, meaning “darling” in Farsi, in 2022, focusing her work on climate-adaptive, uniquely Mexican varietals, sourced from old vines and small-scale sustainable farms. She’s actively working to challenge and decolonize the conventional perception of a winemaker, investing in the next generation of women in the industry. To us, she’s as much a talented winemaker as she is an advocate and a strong proof of concept for diverse leadership, dry farming, and resilience in viticulture.

We also love Jule Eichblatt, co-founder of Kommune 3000 and the entrepreneurial force behind Weingut Schätzel, a 650-year-old natural wine estate in Rheinhessen. Jule grew up on a crop farm in northern Germany and came to the estate originally for harvest in 2020, where she met winemaker Kai Schätzel. They’ve transformed the estate into a future-facing agricultural experiment, planting thousands of trees between the vines, grazing sheep for biodiversity, and producing naturally stable, unfiltered Rieslings. Kommune 3000, which Jule leads, brings young people from across Europe to live and work on the estate, supporting them in farming and personal development alike.

Isabela: What Project Coven initiatives should we keep an eye out for next?

We’ll be coming out with more winemaker and wine professional spotlights and interviews in the coming months, and hope to host our third event sometime in the Berlin summer. We’re also chatting with other collectives in the background regarding some exciting collabs. Follow us on Instagram at projectcoven.wine

If you’re keen to collaborate with us, we’d love to hear from you. Send us a mail to alex@bloom-climatestudio.com or reach out via Instagram.

A final note from FFJ: Last week, Steph Marsden of our FFF collective hosted an incredible event on the intersection of food and play. For those who couldn’t make it, she shared some of the prompts we used in a recent newsletter — check it out below!

Amuse

Fruit melodrama, grocery lists & speculative food futures

Yesterday, I hosted a workshop about playing with food. It was also about playing with words…

Read more

3 months ago · 3 likes · 3 comments · Steph from food/play/food

By Jesse Roth for our CELEBRATE issue

“Music, dancing, buffet, ‘Marseillaise,’ and other hymns against Satan.”

So read the ticket to a 1890 Yom Kippur Ball in Brooklyn. Thousands of Yiddish anarchists met at a hall on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar — and they did so in London, Montreal, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Chicago, too. But at these events, there was no fasting or atoning for sins. On the buffet? Pork. On the agenda? Sermons satirizing Jewish liturgy, a protest against the intrinsic bond between religion and the state. And the rabbis proved them right; enraged by the sacrilege, they called in the cops.

More than a century later, the Israeli ethnostate is committing genocide against Palestinians, having killed at least 72,469 people in Gaza over the last two years (the death toll, according to some experts, could be as high as 680,000). With backing from the US, they’ve also attacked Iran and Lebanon, with the violence threatening to escalate into an even larger war.

In fealty to this genocidal, apartheid nation state, many US Jews are allying themselves with the neo-nazi-enabling Trump government. Mainstream Jewish institutions are choosing state violence (at home and abroad) in an attempt to secure (fleeting, false, conditional) “safety” for the Jewish people.

As fascism, white nationalism, and geopolitical crises escalate across the globe, more and more people across identities will be offered this devil’s bargain: turn on “others” to (supposedly) save yourself. But some of these Yiddish ancestors knew — in picnics and parties, mutual aid groups and worker coops, schools and libraries, assassinations and streetfights — a safety greater than Empire. They understood that pleasure and celebration are fertile soil for revolutionary organizing; we have so much to learn from them today.

A key figure of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century left (and a frequent Yom Kippur Ball attendee) was the revolutionary Emma Goldman. In 1899, at twenty years old, she arrived in New York City with just five dollars, a handbag, a sewing machine, and three addresses — one of which was for the office of a German anarchist newspaper, the Freiheit, or “Freedom.” Emma had come to New York to immerse herself in the rapidly growing anarchist political scene, newly radicalized by news of the Haymarket Affair.

The Haymarket Affair took place in 1886 in Chicago, when workers, immigrants, and anarchists demonstrated for an eight-hour workday. 180 police brutally attacked the protestors. Amidst the attack, a bomb of unknown origin exploded. Chaos ensued, including police firing on demonstrators and each other. The bomb and police crossfire killed an untold number of demonstrators and eight police officers. Eight anarchists were prosecuted for conspiracy to murder a policeman, though it became clear throughout the trial that they had had nothing to do with the bomb.

Emma was not alone in radicalizing in response to the brutality: as one organizer and historian wrote, “Anarchism in America received its baptism in the blood of the Chicago martyrs.” Anarchism, a political tradition born from Eastern European socialist organizing in the 19th century, fundamentally opposes domination and hierarchies of all kinds.1 While socialism and anarchism have a shared enemy in capitalism, anarchism also opposes the domination of a centralized state. For over a century, anarchists have fought against private property, borders, nation-states, police, prisons, patriarchy, imperialism, and capitalism.

From the ashes of these systems, anarchists seek to build a world based on mutual aid, voluntary cooperation, direct action, and collective decision-making. Yiddish anarchism, in particular, came from the Jewish experience of statelessness, of being a diasporic people who always lived (until the invention of “Israel”) outside of and beyond the nation state. As scholars Kenyon Zimmer and Claire Ehrlich say, “Jewish anarchists didn’t have to unlearn nationalism.” Instead, they turned toward language, literature, and culture to create communal bonds — a praxis encapsulated by the late Yiddish Anarchist and newspaper editor Ahrne Thorne’s assertion that “Yiddish is [my] homeland.”

Contemporary Yiddish Anarchist scholar Anna Elena Torres writes, “Some people might assume that because anarchists believe in the abolition of borders, they also believe in the abolition of difference.” Yiddish anarchists fought fiercely against assimilation and universalism. Their understanding of Jewish-ness was fluid and self-determined: many anarchists were avidly anti-religious, others grounded their anarchist beliefs in the holy texts. Some weren’t actually Jewish, but were welcomed into Yiddish anarchism, like Rudolph Rocker, a gentile, who comrades called an “anarchist rabbi.” The Yiddish anarchists practiced building culture without policing its borders.

In the decades after Emma’s arrival in New York, Yiddish anarchists played a crucial role in the labour movement in the United States, organizing large-scale strikes. Some, including Emma and a great number of other anarchist women, also protested military action, agitating against WWI in a campaign that led to decades in prison for many organizers and Emma’s eventual deportation to Russia.2

In the meantime, they also threw good parties.

On September 24, 1890, Emma and 5,000 other Jewish anarchists arrived at the Labor Lyceum in Brooklyn for a “Grand Yom Kippur Ball. With Theatre.” On the ticket, the Yiddish Anarchists invited their comrades to celebrate the beginning of the Hebrew year 6651, satirizing the actual new year 5651. Yom Kippur closely follows Jewish New Year, and is traditionally a holiday of atonement, fasting, and piety. Yet on this occasion, men walked down the street with cigarettes in their mouths, pork in their hands, “growling the Marseillaise.” They were anticipating a reading of a satirical Kol Nidre (Yom Kippur Liturgy) from leading German anarchist Johann Most (who soon became Emma’s lover). Like at other Yom Kippur balls being held around the country, there was to be music, dancing, food, and drink.

But Emma and her 5,000 peers never made it inside. They were turned away by “brutal obstruction of the police” and a bevy of angry religious Jews. The source of the leak? Local Rabbi Marcus Friedlander, who, upon hearing of the ball, translated the Yiddish flyer into English, but not without adding mentions of “dynamite” and “bombs.” He then handed that flier to the cops and riled up his own community to shut the ball down, resulting in a “pitched battle” of a street fight.

The Brooklyn Yom Kippur ball wasn’t an isolated event, nor was it the only one to rile up controversy. Over other luxurious buffet tables, these Yiddish anarchists took on organized religion as their enemy #1, believing it to be a primary barrier to people rising up in revolution. Joseph Cohen, one of these anarchists and a historian, wrote:

We have the historical record that the church served the rich and the powerful everywhere and at all times and helped to keep the people enslaved and in ignorance, poverty, and need. Religion in this sense is really the opium of the people — the worst and most harmful infestation, from which we must try with all our might to free ourselves before we can begin to think about changing the political and economic structure of society.

In 1891, at a Philadelphia ball, a religious Jew and a Jewish cop (Cohen called him “a red-baiter and a rat”) falsely accused five men of inciting violence against politicians in their speeches.3 In 1890, in Baltimore, they served ham sandwiches at a “town hall” where an Orthodox Jew and an anarchist were to debate “Are religion and socialism compatible?” before an audience of 1,000. The Orthodox Jew spoke first, but before the anarchist could respond, someone yelled “Fire!” and the audience fled in chaos. A “lavish spread of ice cream, pickles, cake, and cream puffs” was served at a 1905 Chicago Ball, where famed anarchist Lucy Parsons was a keynote speaker.4 Just as Parsons was about to step onstage, the police arrived and intervened. She backed down. The following day, a headline in The Daily Inter-Ocean read “Anarchists Have Degenerated into Eaters of Ice Cream Puffs Instead of Drinkers of Blood and Throwers of Bombs.”

Though many (then and now) have scoffed at Yom Kippur Balls as frivolous and counterproductive “tomfoolery,” these joyful, militant, and cheeky celebrations revealed the intrinsic collusion between “State and Synagogue;” rabbis were repeatedly willing to turn to state violence to protect their institutions. Though the ball organizers were anti-religious, they were deeply Jewish, riffing off of and having fun with Jewish traditions.

These events were valuable places for base-building: radicalizing young people and bringing them into the movement where they would study, organize, and struggle together. Tasked with helping organize young women into a strike, Emma helped assemble “concerts, socials, and dances.” She writes that “at these affairs, it was not difficult to press upon the girls the need of making common cause with their striking brothers.” Emma felt she was “one of the most untiring and gayest” at the dances — until one night when a boy called her “undignified” and “frivolous.” In return, she made a ferocious speech, decrying ascetic radicalism and calling for an anarchism full of life and joy. “I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things,” she said. In her memoir, Emma matter-of-factly states that parties were the easiest place to organize young women, and she quickly rebuked anyone saying that the movement should be less fun.

Emma and her comrades understood that the means and the ends were one and the same: The act of making a revolution must be as fun and delicious as winning one. This philosophy applied to the support they built into everyday life, too. Along with the balls and parties where they would gather to riff on Jewish traditions, Yiddish anarchists created an “anarchist minhag,” or “way of life:” libraries, schools, housing and worker coops, newspapers, mutual aid associations. These organizers built institutions that wove radical politics into their everyday lives, creating spaces for cross-pollination and politicization over food and drink.

In her autobiography, on her very first day in New York City, Emma ended up at Sachs café, the “headquarters of the East Side radicals.” Before she knew it, she met her future beau Alexander Berkman, as well as two other soon-to-be lovers and a roommate — all dedicated comrades. She later went on to found her own café (with Berkman and Feyda, one of the other lovers): an ice cream parlour in Worcester, Massachusetts. With ice cream, sandwiches, coffee, and “dainty dishes,” the polycule5 used their earnings to fund Berkman’s attempted assassination of strikebreaker Henry Clay Frick.

Joseph Cohen describes how elsewhere in the city, Annie Netter, an “indefatigable” organizer (and a participant in a Baltimore Yom Kippur Ball) and her parents opened their home to ensure that “not only to comrades but to anyone in need” could have a helping of soup (with plenty of meat) for just a few cents, nurturing young radicals and supporting intellectual exchange.

Yiddish anarchists also organized cooperatives for housing, work, and mutual aid, prefiguring the kind of collectivist life they dreamed of. The primary organizing force behind these co-ops was The Workman’s Circle, an organization founded in 19006 that served socialists and anarchists across North America and, at its height, boasted more than 80,000 members. The organization provided healthcare, unemployment, life insurance, elder care, housing co-ops, and burial services to its members. It also operated a Philadelphia cooperative bakery and shoe store, which opened with an enormous parade, scored by a marching band and led by bakers in white aprons “displaying on a cart a challah as big as a house.”

For several years, some Philadelphia organizers also created a Yiddish anarchist summer camp full of celebrations, art, play, and food, which took in the children of women picketing during a textile workers’ strike in New Jersey.7

In essence, these organizers used care infrastructure and hospitality to build a base. With songs, ice cream, ham sandwiches, cafés, cooperatives, and thousands of comrades, these organizers built culture to fight against the state.

Over the first half of the twentieth century, the anti-state politics of these anarchists would be tested, however, by escalating anti-semitism across Europe and the growing popularity of a supposed saviour: zionism.

Today, the dominant cultural story is that all Jews have always supported zionism. But mass movements of Jews across the world — including many Jewish anarchists — opposed this ethno-nationalist movement since the beginning. Zionism and its supremacist promises, however, were unfortunately seductive to some leftists. A sect of Yiddish anarchists fully abandoned their anti-state politics and became zionists, imagining that this nation-state would save them. Other anarchist “cultural zionists” or “labour zionists” attempted to create an anarchist/socialist “utopia” in Palestine, forming the beginning of the kibbutz movement on stolen land, systematically excluding Arabs and creating the key building blocks of what would become the Israeli state after the Nakba of 1948.8

Even Emma Goldman herself insisted that while she opposed zionism as a capitalist project, Jewish workers had “reclaimed wastelands and have turned them into fertile fields and blooming gardens,” (repeating the zionist myth of “making the desert bloom”).9 “The land should belong to those who till the soil,” she wrote, claiming that in her understanding of socialism, Jews have as much claim to the land as Palestinians. Emma’s fantasy of a socialist utopia made her unable to reckon with the ways zionism, as a colonial project, uses working-class Jews as pawns. Even while opposing zionism, she repeated its propaganda.

Other Jewish radicals opposed zionism at first, but later abandoned their politics as Palestinian’s (rightful) resistance to zionism grew more militant. In the midst of the Palestinian Arab uprising of 1929, the editors of a leading anarchist Yiddish newspaper changed sides, writing, “Our last and only hope — a sad and regretful hope, there is no question — is to create within ourselves, in our own people, the power to strike back and fight violence with violence.” In the same letter, they call Arabs “savages” and spread the rhetoric of Palestine being “a land without a people”.

Not everyone jumped ship. In the same newspaper, a group of Polish anarchists struck back, arguing that the anarchist paper had “granted a reactionary ideology citizenship in their minds.” They argued that the British Empire was practicing “its colonial murder and politics of theft” and that the “Zionist devil” was doing their dirty work for them. They decried the “foolish chutzpah against the Arabs” they saw in Jewish settlers. They underscored that Jewish immigrants were stealing land from Palestinians, “land which they and their ancestors worked for generations.”

Meanwhile, the Jewish Labor Bund, a Yiddish leftist group prominent in Eastern Europe, centered its politics around the Yiddish concept of “doykeit” or hereness — building liberation, solidarity, and comradeship in the here and now, without dominating others in the process. Grounded in this concept, the Bund was fiercely anti-zionist. While many other Eastern European Jews turned to zionism and fled as the Nazis gained power, the Bund demanded — through political organizing, culture, and armed struggle — their right to freedom and safety right where they were.

“[Zionists] forget all the lessons of history that have been written with rivers of blood over the last two thousand years,” wrote Joseph Cohen in his 1945 book The Yiddish Anarchist Movement in America. “Sooner or later, humankind will have to come to the conviction that the state cannot solve the serious problems of society because the state is itself a contributor to social problems.” In Cohen’s view, the state — armed, powerful, and privileged — was the root of oppression. Its rulers would never understand the challenges faced by their subjects; the only alternative was to create a network of voluntary organizations that would build an egalitarian society without exploitation, force, or hierarchy. Any state, even a so-called Jewish one, was not to be embraced.

Despite these voices of clarity, Yiddish anarchism’s eventual demise came through a cocktail of assimilation, zionism, and repression. Post-war, in the US, Ashkenazi Jews were offered more and more benefits of whiteness in exchange for leaving Yiddish (their homeland) and culture behind. The US government also took aim at the left through both Red Scares (periods of intense public anxiety over the supposed rise of communism), including targeting Jews in the US for both supposed and actual communist organizing. Meanwhile, the zionist movement out-organized our anti-state comrades.10 Many Jews, including those on the so-called “left,” joined the state-building project that became “Israel”— killing, stealing the land, and attempting to destroy the culture of Palestinians.

Our present moment is a continuation and escalation of the zionist project. While it has been over a century since the Yiddish anarchists and the synagogue boys faced off at the first Yom Kippur Ball, these contradictions between and within Jewish communities remain as a parable for our times. Like over a century ago, while some Jews fight against the state, others ally themselves with its violence — the cops, the Neo-Nazi aligned Trump administration, the Israeli army, and the international frameworks that protect them

On April 28, 2025, in Brooklyn — where the Grand Yom Kippur Ball was hosted over 130 years prior — a group of pro-Palestinian activists, led by the group Within our Lifetime, protested a speech by Itamar Ben Gvir (the zionist regime’s national security minister and a key architect of the genocide). In response, over a hundred conservative Jews chanted “Death to Arabs” while threatening, hitting, and throwing garbage cans and traffic cones at protestors. Outside the synagogue where the speech was being held, they shoved a Jewish woman on the Palestinian side to the ground, where she lay bleeding from the head. (Some reports say they attacked her with a brick.) In a post on Instagram, the attacked woman writes, “The only thing that gives me some joy is that while zios were celebrating and laughing at me i’m over here thinking yall hit a Jew w. A damn israhelli passport!! Great job.” She shares a photo of her bloodied face with a keffiyeh over her head, cowering as the men surround and attack her.

For decades, and more intensely every day, the zionist project wields state violence in the name of “Jewish safety”. As former President Joe Biden said dozens of times, “Were there no Israel, there’s not a Jew in the world who will be safe.” The zionist state’s public relations apparatus (hasbarah) has made a decades-long project of branding all pro-Palestine speech as antisemitic—all while cozying up to the neo-Nazi-adjacent right wing.11

Just before the 2024 election in the US, the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, released “Project Esther: A National Strategy to Combat Antisemitism.” This strategy, created by Christian zionists and named after a biblical Jewish Queen, targets a “global Hamas Support Network,” including organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine, American Muslims for Palestine, and Jewish Voice for Peace. Since coming to power, the Trump administration has been running the Project Esther playbook, releasing two executive orders on “combating antisemitism,” giving them a pretense to deport, investigate, punish, and prosecute “anti-Jewish racism,” “pro-jihadist” protestors, and “Hamas sympathizers.”12

Thus, within global Palestinian solidarity movements, the Jewish anti-zionist left has taken up a key role in attempting to refute this zionist propaganda: How can you say this genocide is in the name of Jewish safety, when thousands of us are telling you it’s not? This encampment can’t be antisemitic; hundreds of Jews are lighting Shabbat candles. We argue that Jewish safety comes through solidarity; our safety and liberation are bound together with those of all other oppressed peoples.

While right-wing Jewish institutions might say we are “self-hating Jews,” contemporary anti-zionist Jewish organizing is actually a deep well of spiritual devotion and practice. Perhaps to the chagrin of our cigarette-smoking, pork-eating ancestors, ritual and scripture often guide our efforts for community, nourishment, cultural organizing, healing, reclamation, and civil disobedience. Many actually see anarchism and non-secular Judaism as complementary: In his essay “Of Performing Mitzvahs and Toppling Kings,” Stephen Gee writes, “There is no talk of an afterlife in Judaism; the focus is on what you do while you’re alive.” In a moment when zionists are attempting to equate the Jewish religion with a genocidal project, and Christo-fascists are appropriating Jewish texts to deport our comrades, divinity and ritual are contested terrain; we can’t cede them to the right wing without a fight.

As weight to separate Judaism from zionism, we must also heed our Yiddish ancestors’ mistakes. Over a hundred years ago, though a critical mass of the Jewish left stood firm against zionism, too many comrades — including Emma Goldman — waffled or changed sides, engaging in the Western rhetoric of settler colonialism. Today, the anti-zionist Jewish left falls into a similar trap, often centering modern Western constructs like the nation-state and international law over anticolonial frameworks. We’ve spent countless hours calling our lawmakers; thousands have been arrested for civil disobedience, and we’ve spilled endless ink trying to convince politicians to stop the mass murder of children. We appeal to the supposed neutrality of “international law” to decide what constitutes a war crime or a valid form of self-defense. Like a hundred years ago, when Emma supported Western socialism over Indigenous claims to the land, the Jewish left is making our commitments to collective liberation contingent on Western political constructs.

But the nation-state and its international bodies have no morality. Its leaders — “left”, right, and center — endorse and cravenly send billions of dollars to enact this mass violence. Politicians parrot stock sentences on the state of Israel’s right to defend itself when it is, in fact, an occupying power. Instead of working within these limiting constructs, the Jewish left must, in the words of Omar El Akkad, “look at the West, the rules-based order, the shell of modern liberalism and the capitalist thing it serves and [say]: I want nothing to do with this.”

If we’re going to walk away from the Western nation-state, then we have to create our own sources of safety, care, and pleasure. In our present moment, it’s tempting to ditch culture in the face of ever-escalating genocide and fascist violence; to pivot to a politics of survival, to treat a library, a newspaper, a dinner, a play, or a poem as silly and extraneous. In the words of a cynical turn-of-the-century journalist, how dare we eat ice cream puffs when we should be drinking blood and throwing bombs?

But our enemies are not so naïve: they are intentionally destroying cultural organizing and social infrastructure because they understand and fear its power. The Trump administration has cut funds to libraries and arts organizations en masse. They’ve defunded public broadcasting and hit newsrooms with FCC investigations. They’ve cut food stamps and food safety investigations. Meanwhile, the Israeli state shells, detonates, loots, and sets fire to libraries containing rare books, hundreds of years of knowledge, precious religious texts, and sheltering families. They’ve slaughtered over 270 journalists, many in targeted drone strikes, while keeping a propaganda chokehold on the Western media. They’re using starvation as a weapon of war. They’re destroying olive trees and attacking Palestinians harvesting traditional foods. They’re jailing and beating theatre directors. They’re targeting Palestinian poets, whose words are, according to an Israeli general, “like facing 20 enemy fighters,” (as quoted by the martyred poet Refaat Alareer).

Yiddish Anarchists understood that cultural organizing is essential to creating a world beyond the nation-state. They built an astonishing amount of movement infrastructure — summer camps, libraries, schools, and newspapers — all while working 13-hour days in garment factories. The contemporary left is working on it: We’ve built popular universities at encampments, drag shows, solidarity economy projects, community gardens, protest kitchens, and the massive web of mutual aid networks that emerged during the early COVID-19 pandemic. But as the feeble support offered by the state for our social welfare erodes under fascism and climate collapse, we need to scale this more than we can imagine. In essence, we must consider how to recreate the concept of doykeit: creating the communities necessary to survive, win, and enjoy each other and our lives in the here and now.

So let’s roll up our sleeves and cook vat after vat of chicken soup, with shmaltz floating on top. Let’s deliver it to drawn-out strategy meetings in comrades’ living rooms; to mutual aid groups feeding unhoused neighbours on freezing nights; spoonfed to activists chained to the doors of weapons manufacturers; to jail support teams receiving cop-battered friends at 4 AM; to fundraisers sending cash to families in Gaza desperate to afford a $300 bag of flour. As organizer Cindy Barukh Milstein writes, “As both an anarchist and a Jew, I’ve long dreamed of do-it-ourselves, egalitarian forms of social organization — ones in which we’re all reciprocally and abundantly cared for, not to mention messy-beautifully whole.” Our bubbes — those women from long ago who cooked for radical summer camps, shilled ice cream to fund assassins, and ate pork on High Holy Days — might be proud.

Jesse Roth is a writer, theatre artist, and organizer of Jewish descent. Her writing has been published in The Stranger and Truthout. She writes I Have a Ribcage; You Have a Ribcage, a newsletter of auto-criticism on art, politics, and the divine. She lives in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighbourhood.

By Lira Green for our CELEBRATE issue

It’s after dark on Thanksgiving Day, and I’m standing on the stoop of a walk-up littered with fallen leaves and chips of peeling paint. For the first time since starting my trek across the strip malls at the edge of my new city, I take my hand off the pepper spray clipped to my bag. The stairs creak as I venture upstairs, and before opening Mara’s door, I let out a very shaky breath.

As I step into her tiny apartment, clutching my offering of cream sherry, I hear laughter, rustling chip bags, the sound of Franzia Merlot flowing into glasses. The room is packed wall-to-wall. Haunting electronic music floats through the air, blending with an array of voices I mostly don’t recognize. Under flags and fairy lights, folding tables hold mountains of food. There are buttery, sage-scented kolaches from a recipe my friend Charlotte had held onto while fleeing Texas. There is turkey and gravy, fluffy piles of wheat and cornmeal stuffing, a pan of glistening okra, crisp shrimp cocktail, cheese balls, popcorn, charcuterie, beer, and “gender rolls,” which another friend and I had sardonically kneaded into the shapes of Ares’s spear or Venus’s mirror — more food than I’ve ever seen.

Every guest, like me, is trans. This is a celebration of our own.

What do people like us have to be thankful for? The President of our country has just recently called to ‘eliminate transgenderism’ to cheering crowds. I’m terrified and furious, and have no idea how our potluck could be anything but a dirge of fear and misery under the circumstances. But as I watch, wide-eyed, all around me transfemmes flirt, play, and chatter happily; vibrantly alive. I’ve never attended an event with other trans women before, or even seen more than a couple of them in the same place. Beholding over twenty of them, cuddling, arguing, and keening as each dish is added to the table is a spectacle beyond my comprehension.

Tentatively, I enter the fray, pulling out a chair at the head of one of the tables and setting down the sherry. A pair of warm brown eyes blink at me from the couch, and I turn to see Charlotte waving before nuzzling it’s green curls back into it’s lover. I try not to look at it’s lips or remember the way it’s apron fell over it’s slight frame as it rolled out the dough for the kolaches the day before.

Everyone looks alarmingly attractive, and I’m intimidated. On one side of me, conversations bloom and topics turn towards resistance. On my other side, spontaneous polyamorous couplings paw at each other and vie for the couch. I have no idea what’s going on. Someone pats me on the head and I yip with surprise, then delight. Slowly, as I settle into the evening, my new companions share their food, stories, touches. Some are generous.

Flushed from the gentle attention, I cast around, looking for the first face I’d ever kissed. From the opposite table, August watches the flick of someone’s lighter with their soft eyes, snorting at the way I hold a joint in the tips of my fingers like it might burn me.

I quickly learn how I hold precious things, too, as before long, I find myself wrapped around another woman. Charlotte squirms happily in my arms, and Stella shoots me a smirk from across the room. Instinctively, I embrace it tightly, carefully, like I’m protecting it from some unnamed thing.

Here in this strange new home, I find myself engulfed in trans women and their joy. Banal joys, transcendent joys. Trans women defending the honour of their pan of mac and cheese. Trans women making faces as they swallow gulps of their Franzia. A masseuse offering scalp massages. A glimpse of someone’s arm with a fresh bite mark that makes me blaze with wanting. Flirting and drinking and eating too many kolaches—the pastry flaky, the sausage juicy and rich—and making a fool of myself and whining at the force of my massage and accepting compliments on the sherry and beaming and learning people’s names.

As my eyes swim over the room, warm and drunk and safe, a strange irony occurs to me. Here, in an unremarkable house on a quiet street off the main drag, where strip malls spread from my campus to the green woods of the suburbs, I have the distinct sense that in that very moment, I am standing in the place that matters most in the world.

Just as everyone’s tipsy enough to giggle, with a flash of golden hair, Jeanne stands and raises her cup, eyes bright with laughter.

“Here’s to still being alive!” she cries.

The roar goes up louder than any toast I’d ever heard.

Oh my God, I think to myself. Shivers wring their way out of my back as I laugh and tilt back my last dregs of sweet wine. I’m going to make it, after all.

Lira Green is a fantasy author who writes stories about trans women who grow old and lesbians who get the chance to be young. Her favourite meal can be cooked by tossing farfalle with a white sauce made with Parmesan and miso, and serving it with white beans and kale cooked in aromatics with milk. She previously wrote a serialized story, My Trans Body Longs for Love and Salt, for FFJ’s BODY issue.

Sunday 12th April

3pm BST/ 8am PST/ 11am EST/ 4pm CEST

About this event

In this workshop we’ll think, discuss and write about playing with food, as well as explore ways to make a recipe for a fruit fool more foolish…

Steph Marsden from food/play/food and Amuse is a designer and greengrocer whose work uses food as a starting point to explore the complexity of food. She’s printed with squid and dared a bunch of academics to throw their food at a wall with the encouragement of Autodineur, a random automated poetry bot.

The event will include the opportunity to make a rhubarb or other fruit fool dessert. Ingredients will be shared with participants three days prior to the event for those who would like to join in. Please let us know of any special dietary requirements upon booking your place.

The workshop is suitable for participants aged 16 and above. No writing or creative experience is necessary for this event.

Due to the intimate nature of this event, places for this workshop are limited.

REGISTER FOR PLAY WITH YOUR FOOD EVENT

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FREE FOR PAID SUBSCRIBERS TO ANY FFF PUBLICATION (see code at the end of this newsletter), STARTING AT $10 FOR EVERYONE ELSE.

This event is part of the Feminist Food Friends programme; a collective of food writers who formed to make the experience writing about food more communal and collaborative. In case you missed it, FFF is a new collective led by Isabela Bonnevera (Feminist Food Journal), Apoorva Sripathi (shelf offering), Clare Michaud (Beurrage), Devin Kate Pope (The Good Enough Weekly), Margaux Vialleron (The Onion Papers), Sarah Duignan (anthrodish), and Steph Marsden (Amuse). We hosted our first meet-up back in September and our second in December; we were delighted to see so many of you there.

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By Clare Michaud

I woke up this morning with a full heart. We hosted a party for the first time since our wedding, back in August 2022 — and a New Year’s Eve celebration for the first time since the winter my dad passed away. Different friend groups met and mingled; worlds expanded. We spent the evening eating a group-created buffet: corn cakes and cookies, beet salad and roasted carrots and fennel-white bean dip, spreads of cheeses and jams, Champagne jelly and macarons, marinated herring at midnight.

We talked about the milestones and shapes that our lives have taken this year: marriages, babies, home projects, things that define our everyday existences. It was a party that I think would be best described as cozy. When we weren’t comfortably nestled into couch corners, we were relaxed in the kitchen, grazing on food; either way, we were, in multiple senses, at home with each other. Standing at the kitchen counter, four of us eating marinated herring straight out of the Ma Baensch jar, we connected over something only our fathers partook in over the winter holidays (our picky, fearful childhood palates stayed away from the strange jarred fish), and we savored it.

I’ve seen a sentiment floating around social media over the last few weeks — as genocides rage on to serve the invasive ideals of settler-colonists and the extractive ideals of capitalists and as these evils seem to become increasingly flagrant — scolding Americans for celebrating the new year while our government bolsters Israel’s decimation of a place and extermination of a people. I try to remind myself that this is the genre of post that keeps the Internet running, existing as a hot reaction to be interacted with through more hot reactions. I sympathize with the sentiment, though, since I, too, deeply hate and am deeply disturbed by my country’s actions, by my country’s ethos. Rhetoric like this gives me pause, forces me to think about how much we really can do to resist and agitate for better policies, for better lives at home and abroad. Often, it feels like we live surrounded by grief: collective grief driven by mass loss and destruction by things like racism and Covid-19; climate grief, as we lose coastlines, seasons, all forms of flora and fauna; the grief associated with the abundant clarity that our society isn’t so democratic after all; we all likely hold some personal grief, too, and maybe these other forms of grief amplify it. Should we not gather for age-old rituals, or find joy from spending time with the people we love?*

The feeling of deep satisfaction, of love, of joy, that I woke up with had everything to do with sharing my home with friends. It’s a seemingly small act with poignant measures that combat how isolated our lives can become — and how isolating our society tries to construct them to be. As people arrived earlier in the evening and then departed after midnight, they thanked us, expressing gratitude and love in words and hugs. Of course, it’s our pleasure, I would reply, my Catholic-raised Midwestern tongue afraid of the shape my mouth would take to say you’re welcome. But I think both turns of phrase ring true: welcoming friends into the home is a pleasure.

What kept my feeling of good cheer running into the morning had so much to do with our party’s democratic spirit. Though we hosted, our table was overflowing with our friends’ generous contributions. A friend who stayed the night eased the initial round of cleaning up at 1:00 in the morning, a task made joyful by drinking remnants of punch and Cava and dancing to Talking Heads and New Order while we washed dishes and put away food.

Marosia Castaldi’s prose-poem of a novel, The Hunger of Women, follows Rosa, a widow beginning to navigate her life as her daughter matures and prepares to leave her home. Rosa finds new meaning through making food that she grew to know through her mother’s cooking, and her mother’s mother’s cooking (and so on) during her childhood in Naples, and opens a trattoria in her Lombardy home. The restaurant is a spiritual site: to Rosa, cooking is a God-like art; it’s also an opportunity for her to connect with others, forming intimate friendships that are nourishing, caring, and romantic. She writes, “Life is ferment battle struggle joy torment It’s never still It is a glorious eternal churning movement in which we were absorbed and celebrated along with our sacred repasts”.

A key component of Jacques Rancière’s political philosophy is rooted in the distribution of the senses: how are our politics shaped by how each of us touches, sees, hears, tastes, smells? Sensability (centering the senses) and sensuality are at the heart of Rosa’s navigation of the world: we see this in the lavish dishes that she prepares for her trattoria, in how she cares for her friends and neighbors, and in how she treats her lovers. By the end of the book, she’s clear in her wish to bring us, the readers, along with her to pursue a life of joy and pleasure, to build new ways of living with her. Life’s challenges and pains are not lost on her: they are the encouragement to care for others and to resist falling into a trap of isolation.

Rosa’s meals — the descriptions for which sometimes span whole pages — connote a sense of wonder and ecstasy that Henri Lefebvre writes about in Critique of Everyday Life: “The mysterious, the sacred and the diabolical, magic, ritual, the mystical — at first all of these were lived with intensity. They were part of the real lives of human beings — thoroughly authentic, affective and passionate forces. Then, with the appearance and development of rationality, they were doubly modified, along with their relationship to everyday life.” When life’s demands don’t slow, and the powerful continue to push on, how can we reincorporate some of the magic and awe that Lefebvre laments? Rosa’s trattoria seeks to do just that, I think. In doing so, she reimagines networks of care, support, and love.

I feel the importance of incorporating joy and wonder into our lives now more than ever. It feels like a resistance to the ways that our society pushes us to be ever-more transactional in our relationships, a society that is desensitizing us to pandemics and genocides. We can’t ignore the world’s grimness, but who’s to say that something radical can’t come out of moments of joy and pleasure with our loved ones?

Previously a baker, Clare Michaud is a PhD student studying culture and landscape through the lenses of environmental studies and folklore. Her writing has appeared in Kitchen Work, the Rose Books Reader, and previously in the Feminist Food Journal.

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This week we’re sharing our first-ever audio story, ‘A Treasure for My Daughter’, originally published in early 2022 as part of our MILK issue.

From our MILK issue

Through the lens of her mom’s non-kosher kitchen — and some of her favourite celebratory Jewish foods — editor Isabela reflects on what it means for mothers to sacrifice for their children, and reckons with her narrow early-20s idea of what feminist praxis should and can be.

You can listen to the audio embed above or check out the version on our podcast via the link below. It’s also available on Spotify, Apple, and other podcast players.

A transcript of the story is available here.

We learned to edit podcasts; designed merch; released a print edition; led the creation of a zine for the Young Southeast Asian Leaders’ Initiative in Manila; won a spot in the 2023 Break program for women entrepreneurs; became a media partner of the Oxford Real Farming Conference; survived successive tax seasons; navigated shipping regulations; given a home to vital writing from all over the world, and connected with so many like-minded spirits in our community, leading to the launch of our Feminist Food Friends collective. Outside of FFJ, we’ve changed jobs, moved cities, grown humans, and somehow through it all managed with our little laptops and phones to keep this thing going.

We are nearing almost 5,000 of you here now, and we’re so grateful for the continued appreciation and interest in our work — which, four years onwards, we feel just as committed to as ever. In particular, we’d like to thank our premium subscribers and BFFs of FFJ for funding just about everything that FFJ relies on to keep going.

If you’d like to become a premium subscriber, at $2.5 USD per month, we’re just about the cheapest Valentine’s date you can get. Subscriptions can be purchased for yourself, a lover, or a friend!

SUPPORT FFJ NOW

To mark the romantic occasion coinciding with our fourth birthday, we’re re-sharing a photo essay from one of our favourite issues, SEX, which was originally published in October 2022 (if you’ve been with us from the beginning, you might remember it as the home of banger illustrations/captions like the ones below).

Meanwhile in Paris by Thomas Jasper conjures what the author refers to “the visceral urges that drive us to lick, bite, and devour…to nourish oneself and to love onself: the most primal form of life.” So sit back, relax, enjoy some photos of sexy French food, and know that we’re tickled pink to have you here with us, four years on.

MEANWHILE IN PARIS

By Thomas Jaspers for our SEX issue

La food doit se comprendre avec ceux qui la font mais aussi ceux qui la consomment. C’est un passage, un témoin de générosité entre un émetteur et un récepteur.
S’alimenter est un acte oral, à l’instar de la parole ou d’un baiser, il s’agit toujours d’un allant vers l’autre. La bouche est essentielle dans toute communion.
Et pourtant manger ne relève pas uniquement du goût, mais s’arroge tous les sens.
Des orgies romaines au foodporn, la nourriture a toujours marqué son rapprochement à l’hédonisme charnel.
C’est ce prisme de la nourriture qui m’est le plus parlant et que je souligne dans mes photos.

Et malgré la fixation du vivant par l’image, malgré cette mort sur surface sensible, c’est la vie derrière.
Les pulsions ventrales qui nous poussent à lécher, mordre et dévorer les chairs qui nous entourent. S’alimenter et s’aimer, la vie la plus primaire.

Thomas Jaspers fait flamber les pellicules et les tappassiettes dans le restaurant Pantobaguette à Paris. Très présent dans l’univers food, ce photographe insuffle un vent de fraicheur à travers ces photos. Il est actuellement directeur artistique de plusieurs restaurants trendy et organisateur du festival La Douve Blanche, un festival qui rassemble haute gastronomie et musique.

By Riana Austin

“Treat yo’self” winks the neon sign behind the patisserie counter of Cream Dream café in London’s Covent Garden, where the candy-hued, fantastical desserts make me feel a little like Alice in Wonderland. At this point, I should probably disclose I’m already a fangirl. As an ex-professional baker and vegan-about-town, I find that Cream Dream is one of London’s best bakeries; for a while now, I’ve been following its owner, Yelyzaveta Tataryna, on Instagram. At the age of 23, Tataryna, a Ukrainian refugee, founded Cream Dream after living just four months in the UK. Her café’s aesthetic might be an ode to princesscore (think cascading blossoms and pastel pink walls and chairs), but from the giant illuminated map of Ukraine by the entrance to the jar of FUCK pUTIN wristbands by the till, it’s clear there’s more to her branding than meets the eye.

Scooping my first bite of her miniature Kyiv cake, I discover velvety creams, crunchy-chewy layers of meringue, and a serious commitment to hazelnut. But I’m not just here for a taste test: I’ve come to learn about those looking to reclaim sweet treats and baking — commonly considered outside politics or a creed for tradwives — as a means of resistance. It’s the autumn of 2025; Russia continues to wage war in Ukraine, while Israel expands its genocide in Gaza. Meanwhile, London has recently witnessed one of the largest far-right protests in British history; in the days preceding the march, a Sikh woman in the Midlands was raped in broad daylight and told during the assault, “you don’t belong in this country,” and in Bristol, a nine-year-old girl was shot repeatedly in a racially-motivated attack. With the hard-right party Reform UK leading the polls, our Prime Minister’s response has been to tighten restrictions on migrants’ right to remain, to propose the use of army barracks for housing asylum seekers, and to ban protest group Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act.

In such painful times, eating cake may seem like an empty gesture, but getting to know both Tataryna and Sara Assad-Mannings, a London-based baker with Palestinian roots, piqued my curiosity. What role might sharing desserts play in building community and resilience? Join me in criss-crossing the capital to trace the stories of two bakers, mindful of violence raging both near and far, but choosing all the same to open spaces that foster connection, joy, and hope.

Fittingly for a story about love, we start on Valentine’s Day 2023, with the grand opening of Cream Dream. To the sound of whooping, Tataryna steps through the doorway of her newly opened café, framed by star-shaped balloons, to greet the growing crowd. Wearing a pink tulle dress and chunky trainers, she covers her face with her hands as the press go ape and well-wishers, mainly Ukrainian women, wave mini national flags. BBC News appears, as does a representative from the Ukrainian embassy. 500 customers buy everything: not just the cakes intended for that day, but her entire stock. When the footage airs that night on BBC London, you can tell the anchor is being genuine when she calls Tataryna a “remarkable woman.”

The accolade is fair, but the journey to the opening was unsparing. While studying for a mathematics degree in Kyiv, Tataryna realized she wanted to open a café — so she taught herself to bake by watching YouTube videos in between classes.

Moving to London was never part of the plan, but war changed that. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Tataryna was forced to flee. She went first to Poland, where, despite her own hardships, she worked to support Ukrainian women traumatized by loss and weaponized rape. Germany came next, then Türkiye, and finally, the UK. When she arrived, she knew no one. She lived in a tiny room where the landlord demanded six months’ rent in advance (compensation for housing a refugee), sleeping on a mattress on the floor. Tataryna longed only for the war to stop.

But those early weeks in London were a crucible that caused something to shift. “I was so, so mad at Putin,” says Tataryna to me as we share Kyiv cake one day at Cream Dream and discuss her journey. She’s wearing a quilted bed jacket covered in tiny roses, her mermaid-like chestnut hair spilling down to her waist. “I thought, what else can happen? I decided I have to live now.” Reanimated, her café concept fused with a mission to provide a safe landing for Ukrainian refugees by offering them employment, a network, and sisterhood. She wanted the space to stand in opposition to all forms of violence, including by offering a 100% vegan menu.

At first, bringing her dream to life was tough. Tataryna struggled to find financial backers, impaired by the double stigma of being a refugee and a woman dreaming about a pink café. Eventually, a Ukrainian investor stepped in, allowing her to set her flag down in London’s prestigious Covent Garden. For Tataryna, sharing cake not only became a tool for healing her community, but as per her slogan — “desserts, self-care and smashing stereotypes” — it was also a delicious way to clap back at haters.

Joy and uplift guide Cream Dream’s decor; there’s something charmingly DIY about it, and I mean that in the best possible way. It reminds me of a women’s refuge I’ve stayed in, where poetry, affirmations, and butterflies arc up the stairs, and there’s a room filled with storybooks and toys for those of us with children. At Tataryna’s, you can’t help but smile when you enter the riotous bathroom. Hot-pink tiles jostle with irreverent artwork (“the cats and I talk shit about you”); the cubicles are painted with flowers, and the mirror is emblazoned with the message “you look absolutely stunning today.” Upstairs in the cafe, there’s a portrait wall of sheroes: it includes famous Ukrainian pioneers, Tataryna’s mum, and a mirror. “For you! Because you are enough,” she explains, and it’s the same generosity I see when I watch her work alongside the fellow refugees that staff her cafe. “Yes, I’m big sister,” she nods when I ask how she perceives her role in the community.

My favourite delicacy at Cream Dream is the honey cake. The sour cherry at the centre is a Tataryna-family twist. I have it with Carpathian tea that comes in a rose chintz teapot. Tataryna says they serve everything as they do back home, “family style,” which I know is a code for “with love.” As I rehearse the ritual, pouring the tea into my dainty cup and using my miniature cake spoon, I’m suddenly returned to childhood.

It’s time now to cross the river to South London. You’ll feel the tempo change; thronging tourists give way to a village vibe, and the flavours we are seeking out also head south, from the Black Sea to the Levant. Our destination is Bunhead Bakery in the leafy burbs of Herne Hill, opened by Palestinian-British pastry chef Sara Assad-Mannings on the day of her 30th birthday in May 2024. Floor-to-ceiling windows flood the space with light, while framed snaps of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, bright graphic prints, and a smiley-face plushie put us in a mellow mood.

Although she is most well-known for her plus-sized, artisanal buns scented with rose water, orange blossom, or cardamon, Assad-Mannings also sells cake, finish-at-home knafeh, and riffs on focaccia (some days featuring za’atar, others perhaps some red shatta hot honey). Within days of opening, the bakery went from a local gem to South London’s worst-kept secret; on weekends, queues snake around the block, and by 1 pm, they are often sold out.

Chatting with Assad-Mannings on Zoom one morning after she’d finished baking, she explained that Bunhead Bakery started as a passion project during COVID, out of her one-bedroom flat. She went on to describe how her journey to a bricks-and-mortar site dovetailed with her rising advocacy for Palestine, where the majority of her family lives. After Israel invaded Gaza in October 2023, Assad-Mannings increasingly found herself gravitating toward Palestinian flavours and using her social media accounts to raise awareness and share resources about Palestine with her 21K followers. Though she’s adamant that her buns are meant to foster and reflect joy, representing the things that make her motherland beautiful, they’re also a vital platform for resistance — as she underlines in her tagline #srslydough: a reminder of the need to act as well as enjoy. Opening a permanent home for her bakery both allowed her to fulfil a professional ambition and increase the visibility and impact of her cause.

From the beginning, merch has been a key element of Assad-Manning’s business strategy. To get Bunhead off the ground, she first sold t-shirts, starting with one that reworked Cyndi Lauper’s pop classic: GIRLS JUST WANNA HAVE BUNS. Another read WE ARE ALL PALESTINE and was accompanied by an image of a watermelon and a smiling bun waving a keffiyeh. They sold so well that Assad-Manning was able to open her first physical bakery space, and later, to support charities delivering on-the-ground projects in Gaza and the West Bank. Wearers spread the portable slogans online and IRL, in the process marking themselves out as a tribe of “Bunheads” and raising thousands of pounds to supply people in Palestine with urgent supplies like tents and water.

With many of her family still living in Palestine, everything to do with Bunhead Bakery is personal for Assad-Mannings. Her love of food is intertwined with memories of feasts carefully prepared by her teta (grandmother); Bunhead is decorated with photographs taken by her father, and on Instagram, there are pictures of a dungareed little Sara chillin’ by the Dead Sea. Being forced to watch as Gaza is starved has been “gut-wrenching,” but for Assad-Mannings, who has inherited what she terms a “Palestinian mindset,” despair must be countered with fight. And she sees baking as part of hers: it is a way to help ensure the survival of her culture.

Sourcing balady1 (local) produce from Palestine is an important part of Bunhead’s concept; Assad-Mannings family members send over what they can, though the war has made this extremely difficult. These ingredients are the secret to Assad-Mannings’ most powerful tool: flavour. Tentative customers are lured in by her original cinnamon buns, before being pointed towards her bestselling baklava buns, or the “advanced-level” buns flavoured with grape molasses and tahini. Being greedy as I am, I’ve sampled the gamut, discovering new pleasures in pomegranate jallab, almondy mahleb, and the tangy pop of strawberry sumac (the fruit is known as “red gold” and has been a vital crop in Gaza for over 50 years, but is currently threatened by Israel’s widespread destruction). Assad-Mannings aims to use taste to foster cultural understanding and hopefully lead others to political engagement, pinning up Free Palestine flyers for customers to read as they queue for the till.

The culinary savants amongst us may notice that buns are not a traditional Palestinian dessert. Indeed, they are a distinctly Sara Assad-Mannings innovation: a feat of skill and creativity, and a celebration of her mixed-race identity (her mother is from Palestine, her father is white British). Having grown up with fragile links to the diaspora and minimal representation, freestyling with the flavours and techniques of both cultures has allowed her to own her story and encourage others to find their own way in telling theirs, too. The buns also raise a joyous middle finger to an industry that continues to pigeonhole global majority chefs while their white colleagues are permitted to experiment or borrow wholesale from whatever culture they like. Though a handful of customers have criticized Assad Mannings’ hybrid approach, the risk has paid off, with Bunhead making it onto the Good Food Guide’s 2025 list of best bakeries in Britain.

Like Tataryna at Cream Dream, Assad-Mannings invokes the domestic sphere to build community. Running the business with her Black-Sri Lankan British best friend, Georgia Wickremeratne, along with a seven-woman team, she manages to imbue the grab-and-go set-up with a sense of intimacy. The two business partners are often pictured together, and they always look so happy: leaning in or unconsciously mirroring each other, covered perhaps with flour or in mid-guffaw. Their joy is infectious, and the rest of the Bunhead staff exude just as much warmth. “I want you to feel like you are coming into my home,” Assad-Mannings explains. In the same way that Tataryna’s desserts are served as if you are family, so Assad-Mannings’ buns are rooted in the principles of nafas — Arabic for the secret ingredient of love.

I carry my box of buns to the park opposite the bakery. Settled on a bench, I am tickled to see a brown woman like me sitting nearby; she’s also polishing off a bun. We both smile. The sun is bright, I lick sticky icing from my fingers, and marvel at the lightness of the dough. In these difficult times, there is much dividing us; the work ahead will be tough, but by regrouping with my sweet treats, I take hope in the continued will of individuals and communities to push for change.

Alright, there’s just one journey left. Take my hand and let’s return to the Thames for one more celebration as the clock strikes midnight on New Year’s Eve 2024.

We’re packed like sardines, and our necks are craned as fusillades of red, white, and blue shoot into the sky. The strains of the track “Apple” by Charli XCX set the mood, and a gigantic LED pink heart lights up the London Eye. The night explodes with tunes and rockets, and a voice clip from Mayor of London Sadiq Khan booms over the crowd: “No matter what happens, London will always be a place of hope and a place for everyone.” Elton’s classic “I’m Still Standing” begins to play, and then Paddington Bear, patron saint of migrants, pops up in the Eye and wishes us a heartfelt HAPPY NEW YEAR! The mood is 100% London: it’s joy and colour and a backbone of Blitz spirit, reminding us to stand together, as we did in 1936 against British fascist Oswald Mosley’s army of blackshirts when they thought they could own our streets. A tear runs down my cheek as a deep pain finds itself tended to with care.

I remember this night as a choice.

It’s not that I’m downplaying the current political situation in the UK, as we wrestle with a terrifying lurch toward the far right. During the summer of 2025, London saw a spate of protests: from targeted demonstrations outside hotels housing migrants, to continued attacks on our Mayor (most recently by Trump in his September UN address), and the emergence of “the Pink Ladies,” a concerned group of (white) mothers and grandmothers calling for mass deportation to protect children from an imagined invasion of migrant paedophiles. Then, on September 13, 2025, we had the Unite the Kingdom rally. Attracting between 110,000 to 150,000 “patriots,” it was led by convicted criminal Tommy Robinson and featured a video-link speech by Elon Musk, warning that “violence is coming” and “we either fight back or die.”

In this darkening hour, food and the hospitality sector have become a focus point for hate. The government has paraded footage of restaurant raids on illegal workers as proof of their action towards ridding the country of “illegal” immigrants; parliament has debated the cultural compatibility of halal slaughterhouses and considered whether pie and mash, a symbol of beleaguered white identity, should be granted protected status; and our Prime Minister has instigated a crackdown on illegal food delivery drivers that has disproportionally targeted “ethnically diverse and economically deprived” areas.

I know this, but I choose to focus on the light as an act of faith in the sense of the word described by bell hooks, renowned writer and intersectional feminist theorist: a quality “not rooted in utopian longing” but borne of an awareness of history and the “many individuals who have offered their lives in the service of justice and freedom.”2 We can acknowledge our fear, but we will not be broken.

In London, pushback is being led by a fierce cohort of women. Olia Hercules and Alissa Timoshkina spearheaded the global #CookForUkraine campaign, raising £2.5 million (US$3.9 million). Great British Bake Off winner and national treasure Nadiya Hussain spoke out about Islamophobia and published a cookbook celebrating Ramadan and Eid. Entrepreneur Lorraine Copes continues to grow her respected not-for-profit Be Inclusivity Hospitality, which tackles racial inequality, and cultural commentators Jenny Lau and Anna Sulan Masing released landmark books exploring British-Chinese and ESEA identity through the lens of food.

As for the two heroes in our story, we need to add a note on difference. The challenges Tataryna and Assad-Mannings face are not the same. For starters, London is not Tataryna’s home. Though she is proud that she realized her dream of opening a bakery, returning to Ukraine is always on her mind. “Of course, I am so grateful!” she quickly adds when asked about her long-term plans in the UK, but it’s clear her precarious, second-class status as a migrant takes a heavy toll. In Assad-Mannings’ case, by speaking out about Palestine, she is wading into a major conflict in the culture wars (there were 890 people arrested at the September rally against the ban on Palestine Action in London). As a mixed-race woman in an increasingly ethnonationalist climate, she will have to deal with racism on the streets and in the media. Despite these dissimilarities, Tataryna and Assad-Manning’s objectives are beautifully in sync: sweet treats + sisters united = a renewed social contract, and a fuck-you to strongmen.

Given how hard our two bakers work and how much they offer, of course, I want them to be surrounded by community and love. Bunhead Bakery has a diverse fanbase — locals, hipsters, and the Palestinian diaspora — and while Assad-Mannings is a diehard South Londoner delighted to represent her hood, it’s this last group’s approval that means the most to her. Back in Covent Garden, I’ve noticed hipsters don’t really go to Cream Dream. I don’t know why — maybe they’re snobby about the colour pink. But Tataryna says her bakery has a very loyal following: mums and their young daughters out for a treat, or women celebrating something special. Life has got a lot better, she tells me, since her little sister has also migrated to the UK: “She is my rock.”

When I leave Cream Dream after an afternoon of chatting with Tataryna over sweet treats, I give her a gift to thank her for everything she does: a small bottle of French perfumed oil.3 The next day, Tataryna texts me:

“I smell like a princess thanks to you ”

and I think to myself — GOOD, you absolutely deserve it.

One final thought — which you could think of as an invitation. We often speak of the importance of breaking bread. We recognize it as a transformative act that draws us into a fellowship of heightened responsibility and openness to the other. But what of the power of treats that are sweeter than loaves? Having spent time with Assad-Mannings and Tataryna, I’m calling for a new culture based on breaking cake: glacé cherries, sprinkles, liqueur. Ours will be a sisterhood; a jamboree with high heels, elasticated waistbands, and a groaning table (you bring your flava, and you can taste mine). We’ll dance, laugh, get impassioned, and eat. Together, I believe we just might put the world to rights.

Author’s note: Many thanks to Sara Assad-Mannings and Yelyzaveta (Lisa) Tataryna for giving up time in such busy lives to talk with me.

Born in Jakarta but a long-time Londoner, ex-baker Riana Austin writes about plant-based dining and the intersections of food and power. She was a 2025 Vittles mentee.

As January comes to a close, we’re sharing the latest edition of our sometimes semi-, sometimes fully annual resource-roundup FFJ Recommends (you can find previous editions listed here) for our premium subscribers.

As with last year’s newsletter, we’ve sourced recommendations from our amazing community of writers, interviewees, and guest editors, including Lira Green, Apoorva Sripathi, Shena Cavallo, Naomi Robert, and Chiara Bergonzini.

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Isabela Bonnevera, founding editor of FFJ

I started the year off on a bit of a reading kick. I finished (late!) All Consuming, Ruby Tandoh’s excellent analysis of the forces that shape our food choices, and I am honoured to be among the first people to receive a review copy of The Spinster Cookbook, Eli Davies’ forthcoming meditation on eating and living as a single woman in a society that privileges couples and families. (It has great resonance with a piece on dining alone by Candice Chung forthcoming in our CELEBRATE issue.)

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