What's your vision for a queer food future?

Issue 179: Using #QueerFoodFutures, a new project will collect and share stories of how food has shaped — and will continue to shape — LGBTQ+ culture.

Hello! Welcome to Nosh Box, a lunchtime-ish food newsletter.

Read last Thursday’s dispatch: Inside the urban garden in Seattle's protest zone

How do we “imagine our radical queer food future”?

This is the central question of a very cool new project launched by my friend and fellow Boston University gastronaut Sarah Hartwig (who, if I may brag a moment, won a Julia Child Student Writing Award this year for an excellent paper on the shortage of existing research on queer food history, and also, with a team of BU gastronomy student leaders, helped organize a COVID community cookbook that raised several thousand dollars toward pandemic relief for the food system).

Using #QueerFoodFutures, she’s aiming to spotlight queer foodways and to share stories that illuminate the role food plays in the past, present, and future of queer culture.

Read her introductory note here:

queerfoodfutures

Hey y’all! It’s Pride month (for a few more days at least) and my has it been a month. In the midst of a global pandemic, and uprisings against racism and state sanctioned violence, many LGBTQ+ folks have been reflecting on our own radical history. Stonewall was an uprising begun by trans women of color, namely Marsha P. Johnson, at a bar. Food and drink have always played significant role in queer culture, from bars and restaurants as safe spaces for queer community gatherings to lesbian potlucks to @queersoupnight

We have not been able to celebrate Pride this year in the ways that we usually do, so I wanted to start this project as a way to continue telling our stories and celebrating together around food, even when we can’t physically be together. As @urdoingreat said in their recent @them article on prison abolition, “ … queerness requires imagining a world that has never existed,” so there is no time like the present to imagine our radical queer food future.

All this to say, post an image of what you envision your queer food future to be (or what it is now) and a description (however long you want, though 3-5 sentences is a good place to start) using the hashtag #queerfoodfutures, tag @queerfoodfutures, and I’ll share your stories to this page. Not sure where to begin? Here are a few prompts: •Queer family meals

Liberated queer food

Sovereign queer food

BIPOC queer food

Accessible queer food

Celebratory queer food

Collaborative queer food

Equitable queer food

Fat positive queer food

Nonbinary food futures

Future queer farmers

Witchy food futures

Your queer experience with food

#pride #pride2020 #queerpride #queerfood #transpride #nonbinarypride #food #queer #pridemonth #bisexual #pansexual #lgbt #lgbtq #art #instagood #queerart #loveislove #nonbinary #trans #gaypride #gay #lesbianpride #lesbian #transgender #genderfluid #instafood

June 25, 2020

And then go follow @QueerFoodFutures and #QueerFoodFutures here!!! (She didn’t ask me to say any of this; I’m just very excited about it.) Also, three thumbs up to you, Sarah, for using the font Shrikhand, one of the coolest and funkiest out there.