Since being a college student, Kailey Flores has had to make her own meals and figure out how to mix both of her cultures: Salvadorian and Mexican.
“For me at least, starting college here is when I really started discovering dishes from El Salvador or Mexico because I was no longer with my mom,” Flores said. “I couldn’t rely on her or any of the amazing women in my family to cook for me or cook with me. I really had to figure it out myself. And things get so mixed up. I’m so many different identities in one person that even clash sometimes.”
Flores is one of the many people at San Francisco State University who discovered the power of integrating personal culture into meals after attending a panel on March 13.
More than 200 people gathered in Jack Adams Hall to hear four chefs discuss the role that food plays in our lives and how it often extends into white supremacy and colonialism. “Decolonizing our Diets: Food Culture as Resilience and Resistance” was hosted by the Race and Resistance Studies department and co-sponsored by the General Union of Palestinian Students and the Environmental Resource Center.
The event shares a name with a book written by the late Catriona Rueda Esquibel, the former associate dean of the College of Ethnic Studies, who was honored at the event.
In her book, Esquibel and co-author Luz Calvo elaborate on concepts of food sovereignty and eating foods that are native-grown in your land, all of which were discussed in the panel.
Crystal Wahpepah, a member of the Kickapoo nation and panelist, is the first Native woman in Northern California to open a restaurant. Her restaurant, Wahpepah’s Kitchen, is located in Oakland.
“I always wanted to be an indigenous chef at a very, very young age because I knew something that was missing, and that was our food,” Wahpepah said. “It was more than just representing our food, it’s representing whose land we’re on, it’s representing our next generation, it’s representing where does our food really come from, how is it grown, who’s doing the soil, it goes on and on.”
Lecturer faculty Gopal Dayaneni, who served as moderator for the panel, spoke on how food can be an expression of culture, resistance and love.
“You can express solidarity through food in much bigger ways, like the exchange of food across communities,” Dayaneni said. “You can express resistance through food by holding on to cultural knowledge through food. Food is a form of resilience and it’s joyful.”
Reem Assil, a Palestinian-Syrian chef who owns Reem’s California, touched on the importance of maintaining a connection with the Earth.
“I feel like sometimes the food sovereignty work is kind of so siloed that it doesn’t take into account these kinds of larger liberation struggles and how they interplay,” Assil said. “When I think about climate change, I think about some of these bigger systems changes. And really, the way to reverse this disaster that is happening is returning the land back to its rightful owners, and that is the indigenous people of the land.”
Panelists also discussed the significance of storytelling through food. Bryant Terry, an African American vegan chef and author, recalled the significance of his grandmother’s cooking, particularly her peach cobbler recipe, which he tried to replicate in culinary school.
“I would never be able to replicate it, not entirely. The cobbler I longed for was inseparable from the hands that made it,” Terry said. “The stories told while it baked, the quiet familiar rhythms of her kitchen, that absence that longing revealed something isn’t just nourishment. It’s memory, it’s inheritance, it’s love and it’s loss.”
Flores, who is president of the student organization Movimiento Estudiantil Para La Liberación de las Américas, reflected on the different perspectives offered in the panel.
“I think it’s beautiful that when we’re talking about all these political aspects of food, cultural aspects of food and those are the ways that we differ,” Flores said. “I’m going to be different than the next person or different than a Palestinian person, given my background. But through all of it, storytelling is so integral to who we are as people in those cultures.”
James Aziz, a third-year biology student and member of GUPS, connected the panel to his own Palestinian culture and how food is representative of it.
“Everything about our identity gets colonized, taken, gets stolen and our food very much so gets stolen,” Aziz said. “ We always hear about Israeli couscous, Israeli hummus, Israeli tabbouleh, Israeli cheese. Even when I’m making food at home, it feels like an act of resistance. If I’m just making it for my family or making it for my friends, introducing my friends to my food as Palestinian food and not as Israeli food where they might hear it somewhere else.”
Samin Nosrat, author of “Salt Fat Acid Heat” and Iranian American chef, spoke of how the recipes she shares get taken out of context for not being “capital-A Authentic.”
“I actually get a massive amount of flak from my own people for that, more than anyone else,” Nosrat said. “What I see in that is a deep trauma inside my own people, an inability to understand white supremacy and the forces of white supremacy that have only allowed one person to be very visible.”
Assil also spoke of the idea that food has historically been an organic exchange between communities.
“I feel like some of that vying for what is authentic and all that is the form of the oppressors in post-sectarianism in our communities,” Assil said “If I think about the people of greater Syria, that’s where my family is from, before the borders came, before the colonizers came, we were moving freely between each other.”
Terry urged for collective action, emphasizing that everyone has a role to play in driving change.
“I think that when we talk about these issues, there’s such systemic issues that we need all hands on deck,” Terry said. “I think about this metaphor of drops in the bucket, and individually, they may not seem like a big deal, but the ground swells. If we’re all dropping in the bucket, that’s how we frequently see change.”
