Black Food Futurism and Taste Memory: Interactive Talk and Tasting

In Black Food Futurism and Taste Memory, we hack our taste buds and expand our palates to explore new ways of utilizing our senses to imagine a new future. By shifting our perception and interrogating our taste memory, we shift our understanding of what’s possible in this world. Inspired by the work of Toni Morrison and Vertamae Smart Grosvenor, this event seeks to reframe scents, tastes, flavors, and textures as powerful agents for understanding our individual and collective unfolding.

Taste memory serves as a gateway to our past, present, and future, holding the keys to ancestral knowledge, personal identity, and the collective experience of Black culinary traditions. Through guided meditations and interactive tastings, we will explore how these memories can unlock new ways of imagining food sovereignty and liberation.

Participants will take part in a unique sensory experience that challenges and transforms their perceptions of taste, opening up possibilities for seeing the world and its potential differently. And by the end of this experience, participants will leave with a renewed understanding of the power of food and taste as tools for crafting more just and imaginative futures.

This event is free and open to the public.