NEXT meeting

FEBRUARY 26, 2024

TOPIC: MIGRANT JUSTICE, FOOD JUSTICE

6-9 PM at Little Egg (657 Washington at St. Marks)

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Our next round of Study Group focuses on the challenges and needs – and opportunities for care and solidarity – of migrant food access and mutual aid in New York. 

In preparation, here are our recommended visual, audio, and literary resources to dig into, several via our comrade Liz Alpern:

Please note that these are primarily pieces from a journalistic lens, though also interviewing folks with lived experience. 

We are humbled and honored to be hosting comrades from Queer Detainee Empowerment Project, who will be joining us to speak on their frontline work. 

Past meeting

January 22 , 2023

TOPIC: BDS PT III

6-9 PM at Little Egg (657 Washington at St. Marks)

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We’re gathering for a final session, for now, on Boycott, Divest, Sanctions, exploring strategic options for food workers to engage meaningfully in this moment and the greater movement.

In preparation, please read through the scenarios in the notes and here are our recommended visual, audio, and literary resources to dig into:

Olympia Food Coop Israel Boycott Overview

The Olympia Food Co-op joined the boycott of Israeli products in support of Palestinian human rights in 2010. This is a brief overview of Co-op boycotts, how they came to join the boycott of products made in Israel, and what has happened in the years since it was enacted.

The Solidarity Index Podcast: Artists for a Just Peace

The Solidarity Index partnered with grassroots leaders Adalah Justice Project and Jewish Voice for Peace to gather over a hundred artists and cultural workers at the historic Judson Memorial Church in New York City on October 26th, with writer and critic Doreen St. Félix, artist and performer Morgan Bassichis, and UK-based musician and activist Samir Eskanda in conversation on the urgent responsibility of people with cultural power to speak out for Palestine. We are being called in real time to answer the question:
What does solidarity sound like, look like, feel like in action?
Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052–2072

M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi

*Specifically these chapters: The Hunts Point Insurrection and The Liberation of the Levante

This book outlines how ordinary people's efforts to survive in the face of crisis contain the seeds of a new world. It does not assume that capitalism ever overcomes its contradictions, that it produces a truly democratic order after a revolution, or even that it represents the scientifically rigorous dystopia that must be overcome. The fictional oral history of a commune yet to exist imagines what forms human agency could take to change their world and their circumstances, how it could be contingent and polyphonous, always in process of unfolding and becoming. The novel shows us what we are capable of and, perhaps, also demands that we remember the future. Quickly, lest we forget.The novel’s insurrections are ambitious, grounded in existing local communities of old and emerging solidarities and their ability to grow into global depth, depicting a great amount of organizational work.

Rallying Resistance: Voices to Visuals 

A visual/artistic history of "River to the Sea" commissioned and published by our comrades at Mold Magazine

Past meeting

NOVEMBER 27, 2023

TOPIC: BDS PT II

6-9 PM at Little Egg (657 Washington at St. Marks)

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We’re gathering for a second session on Boycott, Divest, Sanctions, exploring strategic options for food workers to engage meaningfully in this moment and the greater movement.

In advance of the meeting, please check out the recommended reading + viewing:

— BDS boycott list and context

— Hospitality for Humanity FAQ

— Playback from A Growing Culture’s panel featuring Palestinian food/agricultural and evironmental workers. Read synopsis of events, key quotes, and about the panelists here.

Plus, we’ll be joined by special guest Marcelle Afram, Palestinian chef, a co-organizer of Hospitality for Humanity — our F&B coalition for Palestine — who will be inaugurating our new Palestinian solidarity pop up series at Little Egg November 29!

PAST meeting

October 26, 2023

TOPIC: BDS Lunch & Learn

11 AM-1 PM at Little Egg (657 Washington at St. Marks)

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How can we as food, hospitality and culture workers in New York respond meaningfully in this moment to end genocide in Gaza? How can we take action to support peace and justice moving forward?

Welcome to this special edition Study Group in which we will be joined by Palestinian artist, organizer, and human rights activist, Samir Eskanda.

This will be a conversation about what solidarity looks like in action and how we can mobilize given who we are, our skills, our resources, and our reach.

Food workers are cultural workers.

The cultural and academic boycott was an essential component of the movement to end apartheid in South Africa.

This is why we are focusing on it as FIG.

"Israel’s rulers use culture as a propaganda tool while waging war on the cultural life of Palestinian society. The best way to challenge the normalization of Israeli apartheid on every front, including the cultural one, is through boycotts, divestment, and sanctions."

(excerpted from Samir's piece linked below)

If you want to explore strategic and concrete ways to act now to end the current killing and mass transfer of Palestinians in Gaza and the occupation that has led us here, join us.

With care and in solidarity,

FIG

A bit more context:

— A piece about the BDS movement written by Samir: After Israel’s Jenin Attack, It’s Time to Strengthen the BDS Movement

— FIG has worked with Palestinian boycott, divest and sanctions organizers in past years. We collaborated on the campaign that successfully got celebrity chefs to withdraw from an Israeli state-funded "gastro diplomacy" festival, Round Tables. We also supported this campaign by hosting the Asymmetrical Table, a dinner series featuring Palestinian chefs Amanny Ahmad and Reem Assil, and Indigenous, Black, and Boricua comrades, captured in this short film here.

— Bonus: You can also listen to Amanny, Kim and Ora on the legendary Racist Sandwich podcast which includes George Abraham reading their poem, “Ars Poetica in Which Every Pronoun is a Free Palestine.”

Past MEETING

OCTOBER 23, 2023

TOPIC: Lunch and Learn with SALLY BARNES

12:30-2:30 PM at Threes Brewing (333 Douglass St at Fourth Ave.)

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We are thrilled to co host artisan fish smoker Sally Barnes — alongside our longtime comrades and founding FIG members Kate McCabe and Max Sussman of Bog & Thunder — as part of a New York residency for the "Queen of the Sea."

It's a treat to host this intimate "lunch and learn" gathering together with the only producer still smoking fish in the traditional manner in Ireland, with only wildcaught fish! (Please note that there is NO evening Study Group event at Little Egg this month.)

Come with your appetite, curiosity and your questions!

About Sally Barnes:

Sally Ferns-Barnes began traditional smoke-curing as a means to preserve the bounty that she and husband at the time were catching from the Atlantic waters of the West Cork coastline. Working as a fisherwoman and commercial fisherman’s wife, she smoked her first fish in 1979 and through endless trial and error, supplying the local community with preserved fish, established a famously unique recipe that began winning awards and accolades, including the prestigious Supreme Champion at the Great Taste awards for her now legendary cold-smoked Wild Atlantic Salmon, and most recently the Eurotoques Craft award. Sally was honored to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Irish Food Writers' Guild in 2022.

Working only and always with wild fish, Sally has remained a stalwart of small-scale independent business with a predominantly local client base, and dealing with genuinely sustainable quantities of real fish from local boats when the weather is good and the fish are in season.

With a firm and unfaltering stance against environmentally unsound aquaculture, Sally has won the respect of retailers and top chefs around the world, speaking regularly at Slow Food events in defense of natural produce and now supplying some of the Michelin starred restaurants around Ireland with her deep knowledge of true, natural fish from West Cork waters.

For pre meeting reading, learn more here:

Sally Barnes: Lessons from a Trailblazer

If you are interested in other Sally Barnes x Bog & Thunder happenings, check out this schedule.

PAST meeting

September 7, 2023

TOPIC: Lunch and Learn with Dos PAsiones

12:30-2:30 PM at Little Egg (657 Washington at St. Marks)

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A conversation and tasting with Oaxacan advocate, educator and organizer Neftali Duran and mezcalero Miguel Martinez of Dos Pasiones exploring the dynamics of the current mezcal boom and the cultural and environmental consequences of large market demands on mezcal.

PAST meeting

June 26, 2023

TOPIC: LAND CONVO COLLAB With Catskills Agarian Alliance

6-9 PM at Sunview Luncheonette (221 Nassau Ave at north Henry)

Doors 6 PM; facilitated discussion 6:30-8:30 PM; hang time, clean up and wrap by 9 PM. Snacks and space lovingly provided. Please BYOB if you can! Help appreciated with clean up and break down :) RSVP to save your spot + review the politics of the space.

THINGS TO KNOW: A basic (but not basic) spread will be lovingly provided by Little Egg! Think Egg's famous biscuits and a few dips. Please bring a potluck offering (that would go with biscuits) if you are inspired, and or BYOB.

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In lieu of FIG's regularly scheduled Study Group, on Monday June 26 FIG and Catskills Agrarian Alliance are thrilled to co-host a community gathering at Sunview Luncheonette to go deeper in exploring what it means to collectively build liberatory food systems — ultimately, what it means to work towards food sovereignty.

Specifically, we're asking how we as organizations, communities and individuals can support and move toward greater land access, land redistribution, and straight up land back, in our region and beyond. We will be facilitating an interactive group activity — with some fun new technologies — to think through collaborative and community design with this prompt.

PAST meeting

May 22, 2023

TOPIC: RADICAL COMMUNITY BENEFIT

6-9 PM at Little Egg (657 Washington Ave at St. Marks)

Doors 6 PM; facilitated discussion 6:30-8:30 PM; hang time, clean up and wrap by 9 PM. Snacks and space lovingly provided. Please BYOB if you can! Help appreciated with clean up and break down :) RSVP to save your spot + review the politics of the space.

THINGS TO KNOW: A basic (but not basic) spread will be lovingly provided by Little Egg! Think Egg's famous biscuits and a few dips. Please bring a potluck offering (that would go with biscuits) if you are inspired, and or BYOB.

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What can relationships of radical, holistic benefit really look like for food businesses with the communities they're engaged in and work with, and the neighborhoods they occupy?

"Community benefit agreements" originated as contracts between real estate developers or cultural institutions and the community groups in the places they were moving into — legally structured promises that the newcomers would give concessions and aim to minimize harm with the neighborhood-shaking change they were bringing.

TLDR: Objectives and beliefs are one thing, but operationalizing them is another!

Join us as we explore, with CBAs as a jump off point, the successes, challenges and possibilities of operating food businesses with expansive ideas of benefit in mind.

We'll be hosting a dialogue between beloved comrades Katy McNulty of Pixie Scout and Tadesh Inagaki of 1:1 Foods — members of the FIG core collective whose businesses held it down (and still hold it down!) producing prepared meals for our Food Security Program partners Black Trans Liberation and TRANSgrediendo — followed by a facilitated group discussion.

For pre meeting reading, check out:

Action Tank's Community Benefits Agreements

Arts in a Changing America Cultural Community Benefits Principles

PAST meeting

APRIL 24th, 2023

TOPIC: MUTUAL AID ROUNDTABLE

6-9 PM at Little Egg (657 Washington Ave at St. Marks)

Doors 6 PM; facilitated discussion 6:30-8:30 PM; hang time, clean up and wrap by 9 PM. Snacks and space lovingly provided. Please BYOB if you can! Help appreciated with clean up and break down :) RSVP to save your spot + review the politics of the space.

THINGS TO KNOW: A basic (but not basic) spread will be lovingly provided by Little Egg! Think Egg's famous biscuits and a few dips. Please bring a potluck offering (that would go with biscuits) if you are inspired, and or BYOB.

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FIG's Study Group has focused our co-learning on community food web building, most recently spending the past two meetings discussing Ken Meter's "Building Community Food Webs."

Now we are excited about revisiting an idea for a mutual aid round table, re-ignited by a discussion at our last gathering about the evolution of mutual aid — especially in these past three pandemic years — and wanting to deep dive into how this work is evolving for sustainability and systemic change.

This roundtable will be a deep dive into how mutual aid is evolving for sustainability and systemic change. We will share how we are working to meet urgent needs immediately while building long term transformative solutions (i.e. not engaging in a band aid charity model).

As the Panthers put it: "Survival programs pending political revolution".

Tianna of Star Route Farm and the Catskills Agrarian Alliance will be tuning in virtually and we will be joined in the flesh by Tian of Nuestra Mesa, Pao of Comida Pal Pueblo and members of The Connected Chef team. FIG crew will be chiming in with our experience as well.

Check out notes from last time, and peep the links above to learn more about our special guests! Bonus: Dean Spade's "Mutual Aid" is available for free, here. We suggest reading the introduction and the conclusion. What resonates for you? What has evolved or changed (in the greater mutual aid landscape, in your communit/ies, etc) since the time of this writing?

See you Monday!

PAST meeting

March March 27th, 2023

TOPIC: BUILDING COMMUNITY FOOD WEBS, PT II

6-9 PM at Insa (328 Douglass St. bt 4th + 3rd aves)

Doors 6 PM; facilitated discussion 6:30-8:30 PM; hang time, clean up and wrap by 9 PM. Snacks and space lovingly provided. Please BYOB if you can! Help appreciated with clean up and break down :) RSVP to save your spot + review the politics of the space.

We're in our second month of reading and discussing "Building Community Food Webs" by Ken Meter!

For this session, we recommend focusing on Chapters 3 and 11.

Anyone is welcome to join, even if they have not read the book.

You can also listen to this Real Food Media podcast featuring the author "make[ing] a strong argument for reversing the extractive economy and weaving 'food webs' that restore local wealth, health, capacity, and connection." You can also review the notes from last meeting; thank you, Ora, for notetaking!

We encourage folx to RSVP and join us for monthly Study Group meetings — now the fourth Monday of every month — but also follow along through notes and readings via the listserv, or pop in when you can even if you can't make consecutive meetings.

PAST meeting

MONDAY FEb. 27th, 2023

TOPIC: BUILDING COMMUNITY FOOD WEBS

6-9 PM at LITTLE EGG (657 Washington Ave near St. Marks Ave.)

Doors 6 PM; facilitated discussion 6:30-8:30 PM; hang time and wrap by 9 PM. Snacks will be provided. Please BYOB! RSVP to save your spot + review the politics of the space.

This will be the first of our monthly “winter/spring semester” series at the newly rebooted Little Egg. Save the date for Study Group the fourth Monday of every month.

This month and next month (March 27) we will be reading and discussing "Building Community Food Webs" by Ken Meter!

Here are notes from the May 2022 sourcing meeting for those who would like to catch up :)

PAST meeting

Monday May 9th

TOPIC: SUSTAINABLE sourcing — SESSION 2

6-9 PM at the Farm to People Warehouse (11oo Flushing, Brooklyn NY 11237)

Doors 6 PM; facilitated discussion 6:30-8:30 PM; hang time and wrap by 9 PM. Snacks will be provided. Please BYOB!

A note on the readings:

Our FIG Study Group Revival was such a sweet, grounding, and energizing gathering!

The discussion generated useful questions to guide our work in regards to sourcing, sustainability, and accessibility. Please see the cleaned up, organized notes, linked here; plus readings for this coming session. Beyond diving deeper into the ideas we began to explore last month, we’re also thrilled to invite Steph Wiley from Brooklyn Supported Agriculture (a project of Brooklyn Packers) is going to join us to share their vision and work!

Please familiarize yourselves with this powerful project before we gather so we can make sure to get the most out of the discussion.

What we’re considering entering Sourcing Session 2:

  • Infrastructure and policy work vs market-based, privileged consumer “solutions” and choices

  • Blind spots; there is so often a lack of perspectives and strategies from the Global South and historically/intentionally marginalized communities locally 

  • The contradictions within sustainable/local sourcing having to do with accessibility need to be addressed through shifting resources and focus to networks of support and infrastructures of abundance and democracy defined and lived by Black, migrant, Indigenous, Global South communities

  • Listen at FOR THE WILD, MARCH 20, 2022.

    Dr. Vandana Shiva describes the crumbling of the colonial paradigm and the promise of re-commoning the commons for our collective future. She discusses threats to the commons by Big Tech; the brilliance and sophistication of Indigenous seed cultures and breeding, the toxicity of GMO crops for our bodies and the planet, the benefits of agroecological farming, and the need for diversity in our ecosystems and justice movements.

  • Read on Civil Eats, by Jake Price, MARCH 29, 2022.

    An example of an initiative to strengthen accessibility ~ and ~ local food system

  • Read on Civil Eats, by Ricardo Salvador, FEBRUARY 21, 2022.

    For a bigger picture on national policy.

    “In the first year of his second stint as Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack has made some progress on important issues, but other areas in the department are lagging.”

  • Read on Civil Eats, by Wesley Brown, APRIL 13, 2022.

    For thinking about personal sourcing and our built environments, class structures, etc.

    “Dollar store parent companies say they’re feeding people in ‘food deserts,’ but critics say they’re making food inequity worse. Now, 25 municipalities have some form of moratorium on new stores.”

PAST meeting

Monday April 11th

TOPIC: SUSTAINABLE sourcing — What does it look like and how do we do it?

6-9 PM at the Farm to People Warehouse (11oo Flushing, Brooklyn NY 11237)

Doors 6 PM; facilitated discussion 6:30-8:30 PM; hang time and wrap by 9 PM. Snacks will be provided. Please BYOB!

A note on the readings (and listening) below:

A lot has happened since our first FIG Study Group in 2014 when we began exploring issues of sustainability and sourcing by reading “The Third Plate” and “The One Straw Revolution.” The readings we’ve selected for our collective study now offer a range of questions, challenges, and solutions we hope will serve as productive jump off points for our discussion together in person which is where the juice really is. 

Sustainable or regenerative agriculture is often represented as a white movement while being based on knowledge ways and historical practices of migrant, Black, and Indigenous growers/producers whose modes of food production are simultaneously disrupted, coopted, and invisibilized. The interview with Liz Carlisle grounds our understanding of local/sustainable sourcing in knowledge and leadership coming from Black, migrant, Indigenous practitioners.

Although the “farm to table” article is from several years ago, we believe the elementary breakdown of the issues remains a relevant framework for us to question and strategize around sourcing in restaurants specifically. 

The Black Farmers United piece offers an opportunity to identify the larger structural barriers to equitable and sustainable sourcing through a solutions lens which is what we’re all about; identifying the problems of the food system and exploring concrete forms of action we can take to change them. 

  • Read at From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy, by Alicia Kennedy, MARCH 28, 2022.

    “I think about the contrast between living in and visiting the tropics when I see people receiving fruit from companies that have emerged to send tropical fruit to anyone, anywhere, at a premium, in a new bourgeois expression of an old practice: taking from the tropics to provide something new and exotic elsewhere. Would people pay a premium for fruits that don’t evoke a general idea of “vacation”? Who’s growing these fruits and what are the conditions? Who’s profiting? Could the land be used better, to feed people closer? There are infrastructures of abundance for whom?”

  • Read on Civil Eats, by Hannah Wallace, MARCH 10, 2022.

    “In her new book, Liz Carlisle shows that carbon can be stored in the soil if we adopt ancestral land management strategies, many of which are held by communities of color.”

  • Read on Civil Eats, by Gretchen Hanson, OCTOBER 5, 2017.

    “A chef explains how buying and selling local is no easy task, even if you have diners willing to pay the premium.”

  • Read here, by Black Farmers United NYS.

    “Written by twenty of our original members, these solutions are informed by the collective wisdom acquired through Black-centered initiatives and community knowledge of the missteps well-intentioned, white-led organizations make in their attempts to serve Black farmers. Our solutions are an ever-evolving proposal of necessary steps to make a more just agricultural system.”

If you feel like geeking out even further and have the time, this podcast is a beautiful exploration of sourcing in a more intimate way; an urgent call to address the dangerous loss of biodiversity in our food system and following the stories of very specific crops, products, and communities. It can help us think about how we as chefs, farmers, distributors or whatever our positionality is, can diversify our sourcing in ways that support more resilience in our food systems.

  • Listen on The Splendid Table, FEB. 18, 2022.

    “This week, we talk to BBC Food journalist Dan Saladino about how saving endangered foods might save the world and indigenous foods activist Karlos Baca.”