Culinary focus
Explore the thinking behind food: hospitality, labor, memory, and power. This program centers reading and discussion.
Ink & Ingredients
Food for Thought
Explore food, labor, and power through books by Black women. Four seasonal gatherings connect reading, discussion, and the history behind the table.
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Upcoming offerings
The program describes a scholarship to support community access and participation in the room or on screen. Upcoming offerings have not opened for registration. Share what you would like to see offered below.
Social-emotional learning
Read slowly, question honestly, and bring perspective, empathy, and responsibility to the table.
Literacy
Build annotation, journaling, citation, and comprehension skills through books by Black women about food and history.
Who it’s for
Adults interested in the history behind what we eat. Food for Thought is open to everyone.
What you’ll do
Four seasonal gatherings explore books by Black women about food, labor, and power. Read slowly, underline, and come ready to connect the story with the people and decisions behind the table.
There is no cooking station or recipe to follow. The work happens in what you read, question, and carry forward.
Practice annotation, journaling, reference pages, citations, and comprehension.
Your 2027 reading journey
February 2027
Black Freedom: A Visual History of Juneteenth and Emancipation Days by Blair LM Kelley
Your Turn to Host: A Guide to Great Parties and Gatherings by Amber Mayfield Hewett
We open with two books in conversation. Kelley traces the Black working class through the lives of the people who cooked, cleaned, carried, and built this country, including her own family. Hewett, an event planner and founder of the supper club To Be Hosted, writes about gathering people so they feel seen and cared for. Together they ask the question that launches the whole program: for generations, Black women did the work of hospitality in other people's homes. What does it mean to claim the table as our own, and whose turn is it to host?
May 2027
Thursdays and Every Other Sunday Off: A Domestic Rap by Verta Mae Grosvenor
The title names the only days a domestic worker could call her own. Grosvenor writes about the Black women who cooked and kept house for other families, with humor, fury, and a voice that refuses to be quiet about it.
August 2027
Princess Pamela's Soul Food Cookbook by Pamela Strobel
Part cookbook, part testimony, from the woman who ran a legendary Harlem dining room. Her recipes come wrapped in her own words, and her words carry a life most histories never bothered to write down.
November 2027
Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power by Psyche A. Williams-Forson
We close the year with the book that names what Food for Thought is about. Williams-Forson shows how Black women used chicken, one of the most stereotyped foods in American culture, to build economic independence, feed communities, and push back against the images used to diminish them. Food was never just food. It was power.