You can’t have the conversation about food cultivates community without also having the conversation of what communities are deemed highlightable, or what communities are deemed most amenable for this larger image of food cultivating community. We’re talking about who has access to their culinary desires on a regular basis. We’re talking about food, we’re also talking about who’s making that food. Were you conscious of taking on those clichés of food as community?īW: I don’t know that I was conscious of broaching the assumptions and presumptions that might circle around that sort of highlighted idea that food brings folks together and promotes unity-like let’s all sit down at the same table and break bread! Because food is also labor. You seem to play with those conventions of food as a vehicle for connection but then turn right around and show it’s something that keeps us isolated. I think I’m going to get my hands on what food means to you but then it slips away. In Memorial, as well as those Bayou Diary pieces of yours that I really love. JB: I love the complicated, nuanced thing that food becomes in your writing. The ways in which folks’s culinary mores and culinary desires intersect with their lives and the lives of the folks they care about-that’s just something I gravitate toward, as someone who’s also interested in writing about what does comfort look like for someone? What’s pleasure look like for someone? Food seems to be a vehicle that’s amenable to talking about those things. It just matriculated by way of what the characters were doing, the communities and the intersections of communities that they were coming from, and what their central concerns were. For both Lot and Memorial, neither was initially an attempt to ingratiate the fiction with food, or to have a massive culinary thread running through them. If they come away from it describing me solely as a writer of fiction that’s quite alright.

JB: Do you consider yourself a food writer? Maybe that’s an irrelevant question, but what do you think about the title food writer ?īW: As far as monikers and titles go I’m generally amenable to whatever folks want to use for me, you know, if they’re taking the time to read something that I’ve written and then they come away from that experience describing me as a food writer that’s quite alright.

Family Meal by Bryan Washington