During the pandemic, you created a community cookbook entitled How To Take Care. Can you tell us more about it and the kind of impact it has made?

I think that by making it free with a minimum $5 donation, having other people contribute recipes, artwork and other things of that nature, that project shows an extension of what I said before, how, you know, activism can take many forms. It does not have to be this grand thing where if you can not leave the house, you are not necessarily an activist or someone who is out there effecting change; you can still affect change with something as simple as a recipe. A lot of the recipes in How to Take Care, were recipes for self-care. I feel as though, like, people don't understand that self-care isn't an indulgence, but it's also something that helps to maintain us as individuals.

We raise over $10,000 globally for intimate partner violence and domestic violence. I was expecting to just raise like $300 for House of Ruth Maryland, a local charity. I think people at that time were inspired by someone's willingness to think outside their situation. There were so many other community cookbooks that sprung off. I can think of four or five that came as a result of How To Take Care.

That idea of seeing everything we do in a fractal sense and kind of knowing that one little thing can build upon another thing and can build upon another thing. You cannot even imagine how big of an effect would have and I wanted it to be accessible just because all of us were having a hard time and some of us still are having a hard time. I think if it's something that you can do, like the very bare minimum to kind of help and support one another.

What were some of the challenges that you faced working on How To Take Care?

It was not easy. It was difficult as someone who organized it all; I was not thinking about my role. I knew I would be organizing it, but I didn't realize until the middle, towards the end of the process. Oh, I'm going to be editing, and I'm also going over people's recipes and testing them out and making sure that the recipes actually make sense to someone who will be making it. I trust my contributors, but I also need to make sure that this is not a waste of someone's time and that their measurements are correct. I think that was one of the harder things. I think it was somewhat difficult for me to rest, which was interesting because the irony of that, you know, is that a key element of self-care is rest. The night before How To Take Care came out, I stayed up until like six in the morning, making sure that everything was okay. Then I released it online. I was like, okay, it's live. So if anyone wants to download it, like email and then we'll get back to you within the next few hours, about how to get it.

Once I made it live, I took a two-hour nap, and then I circled back and opened up the email and just started replying and sending it out. One of the hardest things to do was being faced with realizing that you're creating something that is about self-care, but you are not adhering to healthy self-care guidelines. I ended up carving out some time to be like, Hey, like this is going really well. I needed a mini break. We will get back to you, setting up a time, you know, emails will be responded between like 12:00 PM and 4:00 PM. If you do not get in between that time or you do not get a response, don't worry, I will get back to you the next day. It just kind of took on a life of its own after that. I have found time to rest because people at that point were like, how can I support you? And I said, well, it would be nice if someone could just respond to these emails and they were like, great, I can help you. It was like people in the community, helping me take care of myself, which was good. I think that was one of the more difficult things to ask for help to take care of myself, even though I'm showing other people how they can do it.

Have you used your poetry in your artwork?

I had a poem published recently in a food journal called Whetstone. The one that just got published was about waiting for love, waiting for perfect romance as a tomato. I was like a tomato, waiting on the vine for the right person to come to pick me. I kind of have been fondled before by people that didn't have the right intention behind, like taking me off the vine. I had scars on me from the tomato from being handled improperly. Finally towards the end of summer, the right guy comes along and snags me off the vine. Instead of chopping me up into a stew or putting me in a salsa or a suit, he just eats me right there because he doesn't want to change who I am. He does not want to change my true nature. He just wants to appreciate me. That was a story about finding love and being appreciated for who you are and not being changed, appreciated for the scars of your past, and not being discarded because of those things. I love writing poetry.

In 2021, I was going to try to incorporate more of my poetry into my work. I find that when I try to write poetry, like when I sit down and say, I am going to write a poem, that is when I struggle. When I have a feeling and an emotion that I do not want to talk to anyone about, I write it, and then I am good to go. I think that would be the hiccup to creating more art. It would just have to be in a very emotional time and I would just have to be writing nonstop, to get enough out of me in the form of poems to possibly be enough to create work around.

How do you categorize your work?

I would see myself as an artist who does work that touches on my experience as a Black person, and a woman. I do not want to be announced as a Black artist or a Black woman artist. I am an artist that creates work that affects me personally and creates work that is a result of my experiences as an identifying Black woman. I don't set out to frame my work in that way because if I did, then I think that the whole point of it would be missed. I think a lot of the work that I make is very much about feminism and womanism, but it's also about class, gender, race, and many other things that can't necessarily be categorized. Trying to fit my work into one specific focus or arena would do it a disservice. I really try my best to use food, to show people how everything is connected.

I think often in the industry or often in our country, especially in America, we see food as a form of escapism. It's almost like a Trojan horse for a secret. I am forcing people to have hard conversations through a really interesting meal or in dinner, like you are going to dinner and you think you are going to have a really yummy meal and then you find out, it's about Generational trauma and ancestral memory. You are getting a lot of feelings about things that have happened in your family that you may not have even expected to have. I try to use food in a way that gives it the power that it has long had, but we have, for some reason, have forgotten. It has become a tool for capitalism to make people money and to make people feel good in a way that does not really allow them to truly heal. It is more like a self-soothing thing, but not necessarily getting to the root of why they are upset.

With my work, I hope that people are a little bit more intentional after they have had a meal with me or have tried a recipe. I hope that they are a little bit more intentional or aware of how they create dishes for themselves at home or; how they process American history, our history, social justice issues that are out in the world today and kind of see that they can be presented in complex ways, like a meal.

Tell me more about the Hearth & Home project. Did you ever try any of Sybby Grant's dishes?

I did. I had access to the cookbook of the family that was in that space. I wanted to serve food at that event. It was all good until maybe like a week or two before the event; they decided that they did not want food in the space, which was upsetting because it was a core part of the presentation. I did get to make the food that she was known for, like her turtle stew, a Washington cake, and others. It was interesting just because many of the recipes would say, "one cup of flour." The measurements at that time were very different from today's measurements. Today, everything is very streamlined with standards. Back then one cup could have meant one teacup or one larger mug. You are just not really sure. It was interesting to try out some recipes and then make my own tweaks along the way to update them.

How was that event impacted by not having food like you initially had planned? Was it still a success ?

I think it was still a success but I think it took away the power behind the actual event. If I had known in advance that there was going to be an issue, I would have prepared for it. I would have had a menu available for download. I would have had a QR code that people could scan to have a whole PDF full of the recipes that I tried.

While I do work with food, not everything that I do is rooted in food. Not everything that I do is consumable or edible. Some things I do are connected to food. For example, I also carve wooden spoons, you can not eat a spoon, but it is still connected to the food and dining experience. I feel one of the positives I can take away from this experience of 2020, and also that experience, which oddly enough, I guess, would have been like a foreshadowing of what was to come, is not being able to get people to the food, to a part of the work that I feel it is key. It really allowed me to kind of pivot and think, how can I further empower people to explore this.

I do not know what the statistic is. But people cooking at home before COVID was on a sharp decline. More people are starting to realize it is cheaper to buy ingredients and make a meal, and you get more food, and it lasts you longer. I am happy weirdly, that we are now coming to that realization, but it is also unfortunate that it took a global pandemic for us to do so. Do I think that, there's a way to have meaningful conversations around food without food being present? Absolutely. But I think that requires more imagination on the host of the conversations to get people fully engaged. I think that if you you passionate about the topic at hand or the subject at hand related to food, then it is easy or if it is fun and exciting to get people to think of things in a more complex way than they would have thought about it before. Maybe leaving them to think differently about cornmeal versus just something that they do not use like that, but maybe they can now use it as a face scrub or a body scrub or explore the history of corn in this country. How it has really kind of helped us survive or even explore the history of indigenous tribes and their growing practices.

There are so many things that we can learn from food. Foods hold so much history that we have seemed to forget just because of how the supply chain is now with food, getting things from a grocery store, and not growing our own food. I think that history is one of the things, one of the tools, and one of the things that could essentially liberate us or get us more towards a just food future, or even not necessarily connected to food -- a just future period. I think that there is going to be some interesting challenges ahead for artists like myself who do work with food or work with a medium that people really need to experience, but I think if anything, it will allow our work to evolve. It won't be too much of a limit.

Who do you cook for?

I cooked for my partner, my family, and friends. I cook for my community to raise money for them, so I cook a lot. It is one of my ultimate love languages. I only cook for people and things that I care about. I feel like I am getting my hands on something, I am feeding someone and I am making sure that they are nourished. And not only that they are nourished, but that they are enjoying the process of nourishment because that is what eating is, it is the process of nourishing our bodies. It does not necessarily have to be this dystopian thing where it's like, we are eating a pill or taking a pill and we have had our supplement for the day. It can be an enjoyable process. Even if we do not have very much, we can still have a special moment with the food that we do have.

When I thought about Sybby, I was like, who cooked for her? We know that she created all these grand meals.Does she take the same care for herself? Does she even have the ability to take the same care? As far as like time and ingredients, because this is a time without grocery stores. This is the time without burners. Everything is cooked on a hearth. That is a lot of heat and a lot of fire in a small basement where it is dangerous. You can catch on fire and bun yourself. She had to walk down the Lexington market to get the ingredients that she needed. It was just a lot of effort on her part. I don't think that it would ever have been fully appreciated in the way that it should have. When we think about enslavement at that time, we often forget that these were people too, they probably had the same issues that we have today.

Sybby was enslaved in the Hackerman House in Baltimore. City enslavement seemingly was a different type of enslavement, even though all enslavement was evil. She had the quote "freedom to go get groceries for this family and cook for them." We don't know if she was dating anyone, had a romantic life, or if she loved cooking. We don't know if she hated it, but thought this was one of the better roles to have in this position of enslavement. There is so much that we do not know. I take pride in having the ability to choose who I'm cooking for and to choose the things I want to cook. I feel privileged to live in a time where the food system weirdly is what it is and that I can eat all the things I want to eat. I think about those privileges a lot.

I think about the privilege of power and electricity to cook. I know I would not be as good of a cook, if the roles were reversed and I had to be in that time. I don't know how to break down a turtle. Looking at the recipe for her turtle soup, it was very intense. You had to take a live turtle and boil it. After you take the turtle out of the pot you take off the nails and shell. Now I can just go down to Lexington market and get turtles that are already cooked. There are little things to be thankful for every day and there are little things that I feel so much gratitude for the people who came before me.

I know that I won't necessarily have this ability to do this for the rest of my life. As human beings, we forget that we get old. While I have the ability to cook for myself, eat the things that I want to eat, while I still have really strong taste buds and chew the things that I want to chew, I want to cook while I still have the dexterity to hold a knife and chop things. I should not be so complacent with a processed food system that tells me it is okay to give myself this microwave dinner because it saves me time and that time will be applied to like watching more TV or something else. I appreciate the time it takes to cook a meal because I feel like it is very meditative and puts me in the present moment of my body. It allows me to appreciate moving around, because I know that I won't be able to stand on my feet like this when I get old.