Cultural Food Traditions Project
Exploring cultural food traditions and food’s connection to one’s land and community.
Celebrating and honoring migration and its importance in the food system.
Highlighting diversity in our food producers and providers.
Nourishing our bellies and minds
Slow Food East Bay’s Cultural Food Traditions Project came to be in 2018, as a way to fight back against racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric becoming more and more prevalent in our national conversations.
We saw a way to engage eaters by connecting delicious food to the greater conversations around immigration and both forced and by choice migration of peoples throughout the world. Using joyous gatherings that included a multi-course meal and conversations with our chefs, partnering nonprofits and community members, we brought to the surface how immigrants, refugees and displaced people contribute to the food system.
We believe it is our responsibility to support policies that support the people that support our food system!
The original iteration in 2019 and 2020 was a series of eleven gathering in fourteen months featuring chefs ranging from Senegal to Syria to Mexico to Vietnam to Bhutan. Each dinner’s chefs cooked a meal of their authentic cuisine and got to tell the story of their resettling in the US and we were joined by a local nonprofit that works with recent arrivals, helping with housing, language skills and economic opportunities.
In 2023 we revived the Project focusing on Island nations, so that we could talk about climate change and its effects on migration and changing foodways. We had the privilege of working with talented chefs from Hawaii, the Philippines and Puerto Rico and partnering with nonprofits working to maintain native foodways through cultural education and language skills.
In 2025, we are launching our next series: Countries in Conflict. With unrest throughout the world, what food traditions are lost when a country is at war? We are looking to have conversations around the loss of generational knowledge, the inability to celebrate holidays or harvests in the traditional ways and even how agricultural processes are disrupted leading to food insecurity and the loss of food sovereignty. From Ukraine to Sudan to Palestine, we are looking forward to gathering together as a community to have these important and difficult conversations
