What a Guest Lecture on Food Traditions Taught Me About Identity, Memory, and Storytelling
Last week, I was furloughed from my position as an analyst at a public policy firm that contracts with many federal agencies. For me specifically, much of my time was spent collaborating with the Department of Education and the USDA Food and Nutrition Service, helping them evaluate their programs and drive toward impact. In the same week, I was invited to guest speak about food traditions and identity for a class of university students in New York City. Life is strange like that – closed doors often crack open new ones.
Food is by far the most overlooked and impactful aspect of our everyday lives. I think because of how mundane eating has become in a hyper-focused, overworked society, we aren’t accustomed to making the time and space to really think about just how important it is to us, and not just in a way to help fulfill a physical need, but our every need.
Despite being caught up in our daily mix, the stories that our food tells, often left in the rush of it all, still represent those pieces of ourselves that we’ve forgotten; some of those pieces we never knew about in the first place.
The magic of food is more dynamic than its ability to nourish our minds, bodies, and spirits. The ingredients, methods, and intentions lie in traditions that collectively preserve our cultures. The experiences and memories tied to them weave intricate designs that tell stories about who we are and where we come from.
Last week I was privileged to walk a group of students at Fordham University through these concepts, including the importance of our individual food stories and how they tie into our identities. It was an opportunity that pushed me to blend my experience as a chef, epicurean, and researcher into a presentation that uncovered some truths that I’m sure changed the way they look at food. It sure did for me. Here’s how it went:
How I got the opportunity
Firstly, this opportunity wouldn’t have been possible without the power of a solid and genuine network. Having friends in high places will take you farther than hours of grunt work on its own ever will.
I have to take this moment to thank Francesca Small, who was a schoolmate of mine from Spelman College while I was finishing up my bachelors degree at Morehouse. Francesca is now an English and ESL professor at Fordham University as she completes her Ph.D.
When her fall semester wrapped up, she made a post on Instagram describing her spring offerings which included her Composition II course that would answer the question, ‘why does food evoke such powerful emotions and memories?’.
I would have stiff- armed folks to get an audit opportunity, but she raised my bet, offering instead for me to come speak to her students about my work as a chef and researcher. If there’s one thing that I love about Spelman women – they’re like elevators, routinely raising the floor and the ceiling at the same time, and if you ain’t on it, you will get left.
She sent me the ACH documents and I got down to business. In the next three weeks I curated a discussion about foodways, our food stories, and how all of our food memories tie into our identities.
Preparing for the presentation
In hindsight, I definitely over-prepared for this joint. Very on-brand for me though. I spent a lot of time beforehand studying articles from the course syllabus, doing my own cursory search, all that.
Long story short, I only made it through half of the presentation before their curiosity led into a full-blown Q&A about the business and my philosophy anyway. They asked me some amazing questions though.
I was honestly excited to use the technical assistance skills that I learned in my career for me. After I made a list of key search terms, an excel sheet to organize my sources, and a draft lecture guide littered with my fragmented ideas, I was finally ready to… begin? I know why, but I don’t know why starting is such a difficult thing for me.
In my left brain, I’m a backwards thinker and I tend to reverse engineer things instead of letting what’s in front of me grow. My right brain is architectural – expressive with metaphors, patterns, and measurements. “The beginning” is where they wrestle and struggle with one another until the other concedes.
My goal was to bring students to an understanding of how food takes us forward and backward in time, bringing pieces of our history and culture with it… a super dense topic to say the least.
An important step that I missed until just a few days before the talk was understanding who I was even talking to in the first place. I had my assumptions – college students who probably only registered for the course to get the credits – and while some of this was true, I learned that the class was a shy but thoughtful bunch so I had to think about how to engage them.
Some of y'all know but for those who don’t, I have a background as an educator so standing in front of a group of people to talk about things comes almost second-nature to me but I still needed to understand my audience so that I could speak to them and not past them. When it was all said and done, my presence was enough to get the group engaged with me, but I’ll talk about that in a moment.
My priority was to make sure that I made the lesson interactive so I spent some time coming up with intriguing discussion questions and a case study activity where students would have to think critically about the way food has been (and still is) used as a form of resistance or as an important piece of their creators’ identities. The purpose of these questions was mainly to help situate students in places they’d otherwise never think about.
One of the things that I think makes me an excellent researcher is my knack for falling down the rabbit hole. I used Google Scholar and academia.edu to narrow my search and was amazed at how many scholars are out there writing about foodways, the connections between food and people, and diaspora – many of whom are women of color.
My starting point was a Vogue India article by Jehan Nizar: A Brief History of the Intimate Tradition of Oral Recipe Sharing. It was from this starting point that I learned about other authors, such as Razia Parveen and Deepika Shetty, who describe the influence of South Asian and Middle East flavors as they travel between carriers, the foundation for my searches around different diasporas.
Delivering the lecture
After three weeks of curation, I walked into class with more material than I’d ever get through—and that was perfectly fine. Because what unfolded was something deeper. We never made it past the halfway mark and honestly, that’s exactly what made it special.
The goal of my presentation was to bring students into a conversation about how food acts as an anchor—how it preserves memory, fosters resistance, and travels with us across time and place. Titled “Food, Culture, and Identity: Enhancing Our Relationship with Food,” the presentation introduced key concepts like foodways, food traditions, food stories, and our personal relationships with food.
I introduced myself as a person whose life mission is to enhance our relationship with food, which in and of itself consists of identifying food traditions, food stories, and nostalgia. I shared how I got my business started, how I tie my career as an educator and researcher into my work, and how my brothers and I manage a non-profit that helps families in need with food during the holiday season.
Starting with a simple icebreaker: “What food makes you feel at home, and why?”, I softened the room, prompting students to think with both their stomachs and their hearts.
From there, I laid out the framework I created: food as a critical piece of every culture and then food traditions vs. food stories.
These weren’t just abstract concepts—I rooted them in examples from my own journey as a chef and cultural purveyor. I shared some of the traditions that my family partakes in, like fasting for Lent, but also memories tied to my grandmother teaching me how to make spring rolls, why cast iron means so much to me, and communal cooking that reminded me of home.
Of course, the psychologist in me had to ground the conversation, so I used Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to frame food not just as sustenance, but as something that cuts across every level of human need, with emphasis on the need for love and belonging. From there, we moved into the meat of the lecture: diaspora and resistance.
We unpacked how recipes are more than dishes, but acts of survival, adaptation, and resistance. I used examples like Borscht, a beet-based soup that many Eastern Europeans depended on in times of persecution (like the Ukranians right now) and lentils, which many Palestinians are depending on as they endure the worst of an Israeli siege.
Francesca did a remarkable job identifying literature to support their learning throughout the semester. One of my favorites that I drew from, Postcolonial Tastes by Parama Roy, helped ground my lecture in how colonialism doesn’t just shape borders. It also reshapes what people eat, what they have access to, and how they preserve their heritage through food.
These food traditions, particularly among communities who were colonized, enslaved, or displaced, became mechanisms of survival. Recipes passed down by word of mouth—sometimes in kitchens, other times in code—hold the wisdom of our ancestors and the will to persist.
That’s when the questions started. Not the ones I had prepared for. The ones about me.
What did you study in school?
How did you become a chef and start your business?
What makes your food different from everyone else’s?
How do you balance your love for food with your work in policy?
What’s your perspective on seed oils?
I looked up and realized: the lecture had become a conversation. The curiosity in the room shifted from theoretical to personal. They didn’t just want the facts—they wanted the story. So I told it.
I shared how growing up around strong women in the kitchen shaped my values. I talked about how I’ve used food not only as a creative expression but also as a political tool. I expressed how big it was for the Jamaican aunties in St. Elizabeth to show me how they season and fry snapper after tying it shut with the thick grass at our feet. I anchored every response in the same truth: our food, like our lives, is not untouched by history. Colonialism changed trade, changed culture, changed appetite—and our food tells that story whether we realize it or not.
We never made it to the case study activity, but by no means was that a loss. That classroom became a potluck of stories, questions, and revelations—and to me, that’s exactly what this kind of work is about.
What I learned from it all
This experience was a stark reminder of one of the biggest lessons that I learned as an educator: it doesn’t matter how much you prepare for your lesson, it will not go as planned. I appreciate the flexibility that this life forces upon me. I tend to overdo things with my expectations and I need the humility that comes with having to adjust in real time. Presence and authenticity are oftentimes the best thing that you can bring with you to the classroom.
Secondly, food is an invitation. This isn’t really a lesson learned, more like a lesson that I’ve been actively learning, and my research really showed me how food opens portals not just for me but for everyone on this earth. It’s also an invitation into hard conversations about how power can grip our world, extracting all that it's worth without second thought.
At the same time, it’s an invitation to be joyful – the magic of nostalgia and its ability to transport us in, out, and across time and space can be accessed every time we take a bite of something familiar. It’s where we go when we want to feel safe and comforted.
And on a more personal note, I was reminded (again for the thousandth time) that I’m not just a researcher, or a chef, or a change agent—I’m a storyteller. And my work is about helping other people find the story in their own food, in their own memories, and in the questions they never knew they needed to ask.
Food doesn’t just belong in cookbooks or restaurants — it lives in us. The next time you eat something meaningful, reflect on its story and the journey it took to get to you. Ask a family member about a dish they love and have them do the same.
If we don’t tell these food stories, who will?
