Note: Hi there. My mission here has shifted slightly. The letters you receive from this point will not necessarily revolve around a quote, but instead, around *something* (or someone) that has stood out to me in the past month. This month, it is Salimatu Amabebe and Black Feast, so I decided to go back to my roots with a Q&A. Thank you for bearing witness.
Salimatu Amabebe is a chef and artist based in Portland, Oregon. In 2017, they created Black Feast, “a culinary experience that weaves food into a celebration of Black artistry.” Joined by Annika Hansteen-Izora in 2018, the pair host vegan pop-ups around the country with musicians like Nina Simone and Madison McFerrin, photographers like Erica Deeman, and writers like Safia Elhillo and Ntozake Shange at the center. The food created is an interpretation of the work.
In February, Amabebe embarked on an artist’s residency at 2727 California Street, bringing them to Berkeley, CA where I met them earlier this month. During the month of June, in the midst of protests and a pandemic, Amabebe has been offering free dessert and love letters to Black people in collaboration with Hansteen-Izora and Black Feast. A little over a week ago, I asked Amabebe if they’d be willing to tell me about themselves and how they got into this work. On the phone, we talk about that—and about community, audience, and showing care. We laugh along the way.
-Salimatu Amabebe-
|| “Should I keep my mask on or take it off?” ||
Abigail Bereola: Can you tell me a little bit about yourself in relation to cooking?
Salimatu Amabebe: I work as a chef and a multimedia artist. I studied film in school and when I graduated, I went into the art world. But my first job after college was in a kitchen working as a line cook, and then after that, I moved to New York and got into galleries.
I didn’t like working in a kitchen and I also didn’t like working in a gallery, so I kind of just kept going back and forth, trying to do art things and then trying to do food things. I got a residency in Berlin at one point that was focused on food, art, and ecology and so, I started thinking a bit more and had more of a framework for creating food art events. And then, from there, I ended up moving to Portland, Oregon and that’s where I started Black Feast. But I’ve worked in food for, I would say, over ten years now.
AB: I’ve also worked in restaurants and I feel like people get into food in a lot of different ways. For you, was it something where you felt called to do this work or was it more like, “I need a job. I can get a job at a restaurant”?
SA: It was a bit of both. I grew up cooking and I always loved cooking with my family, but I didn’t think of that as a unique trait or characteristic because I’m Nigerian and of course you cook. That’s just part of the culture, cooking and eating. And so I didn’t think of that as a special thing because it’s just something that I grew up doing. It was a very natural thing to do. And then, I got a job in a kitchen because I needed to make some money to move to New York.
Because of the ways that the kitchens I worked in were run, I didn’t think of cooking as something that I was passionate about—it was really grueling work and it wasn’t fun and people treated me really badly. You know, kitchens are a mess. The food industry is a mess. But when I started doing more freelance chef work and more catering, I started to realize that there was more space in the industry to be something that I hadn’t experienced it being. That it could be a really supportive environment, it could be a fun environment where you also work really hard and where you get to express yourself creatively and can do stuff in a way that feels good for you. So, I think that it was very much a job or something that I did to make money until I realized that it could be something else.
-June 7-
|| gooey vegan butter cake with mango cream, lime curd, fried maple cornflakes, nectarine and nasturtium ||
Photo by Jessa Carter
AB: What made you want to start a food art event dedicated to celebrating Black artists?
SA: At the time, I was hosting plant-based Nigerian food pop-ups and that was my main source of income. I was making food that was important to me and the food that I grew up eating, but because I was working in Portland, Oregon, it was a primarily white audience. A lot of the feedback I was getting from the company that I was working with about how to bring in more people was that I needed to market it as being a unique cultural experience. That felt really uncomfortable because it wasn’t unique to me—it was something very natural. I felt a lot of pressure around that, to kind of create this caricature of my own culture in order to make money, in order to make it marketable, because it wasn’t seen as marketable. I had to tap into the narrative of it being “other than,” or it being rare and kind of a novelty in order to make people care about that type of food and care about that type of event, and then most of the people who would come to it were white people.
When I first started doing it, I was just so excited to be able to do the thing that I loved and to make the food that I loved and to make any money at it at all. To even just not be losing money from it. And then, the more that I did it, I started seeing that it didn’t feel good to do it anymore. It didn’t feel good to do it for that audience and it didn’t feel really supportive. I was struggling at it.
Since I’m a multimedia artist, a lot of what I think about is audience. Who is this work for? What institution, what setting, is it intended to be in? I recognized that I needed to think about food in the same way—that I wanted to think about who the food was for, who the space was for. Who it was made accessible to and convenient for. And that’s how I started Black Feast.
I wanted to make an event that was for Black people and I wanted to make it something that was truly accessible. That anyone could come to with any amount of money—they could come and they could participate in this event. It’s very, very difficult to make something truly accessible because we all carry many blind spots with us. We don’t know what we don’t know. But that’s something that I think about and that’s something that I work towards with this event, constantly asking people what they would want, what would be supportive, what would be helpful. How can we change the model to actually change with people and change with our ever-fluctuating and morphing needs?
AB: That’s really awesome.
SA: Thanks.
-Altar of Black Life-
|| “I felt compelled to build the altar as a space of remembrance and also recognizing for myself how healing it can be to have a physical site or physical manifestation of care and of grief and of community,” Amabebe says. ||
AB: So, you came to Berkeley to do this three-month artist’s residency and then a pandemic hits and then—I mean, racism has always been a thing and—
SA: And then white people discovered racism.
AB: Right, right. Exactly. So you’re here, a pandemic hits, and then white people discover racism, and then you decide to offer free dessert and love letters to Black people. How did that come about?
SA: Well, part of my plan during my time here was to host Black Feast once a month. But then when shutdown started, it was very clear that I wasn’t going to be able to host a sit-down dinner for 40-something people. It took us a little time to think about what changing that model might look like, but we talked about hosting something through a pickup window. So, we had a Black Feast event that we did through a pickup window and it went really, really well. We were able to give people a lot of food. Normally, I make it sliding scale for people of color. But this event, I was like, “I just want this to be free for Black people. I don’t want to do sliding scale, $5 to whatever, I just want it to be free.” And so, for non-Black people, the idea was that you can buy your meal, but you also pay for another meal and then that meal gets donated. The idea was either you’re getting for yourself and you’re getting for someone else or you’re just not getting anything. Or you’re just getting for someone else. But there’s no, “I’m just gonna pay for my meal and I’m not going to worry about other people. I’m not going to worry about Black people.”
It actually went pretty well. We had a really good turnout for that. And then, you know, when white people discovered racism and—I shouldn’t say that. I shouldn’t frame it as something that is part of whiteness, white history. I say that as a joke. But when a lot of these protests started, I went to a lot of them. I was just in my grief, fully. And I feel like we all were and still are. I wasn’t taking care of myself, I wasn’t sleeping, just crying constantly. I just wanted to do something and because this is what I do—this is my work: making food, making art for Black people—I knew that I just wanted to do something, so I talked to my collaborator in New York about doing an event where—she’s a poet—we could include some of her poetry and my food and just do that once a week. And so, that’s what we did.
-June 14-
|| watermelon cheesecake with chocolate crumble and mint crème ||
To me, it feels really small. I guess that a lot of the things that I do, when I think about them, feel really small, but it didn’t feel like this is such a big task. It just feels like this is the least that I can do. This is the least that someone can do. People are happy doing less, I guess, but it just feels like the least I can do in this situation.
AB: I mean, as a recipient, it doesn’t feel small.
SA: That means a lot. I don’t mean to downplay it in a sense. I guess what I’m saying is that what is happening in the world feels so monumental and overwhelming that it feels impossible to even know how to respond. All I know how to do is just to show love and care to my community. That’s the work that I have been doing. So I think love letters is just another manifestation of that. In some ways, it doesn’t feel big because this is what we always do—we always give food to our community. And so, we’re just doing it slightly more often now.
-June 21-
|| black sesame chocolate cake with yuzu cashew cream and butterscotch ||
Photo by Salimatu Amabebe
AB: Why dessert and love letters specifically?
SA: The love letters were partially just about wanting to share care and tenderness. Annika talks a lot about tenderness in her work as it relates to Blackness. And desserts—desserts are kind of this thing that’s thought of as a luxury. This sweetness. I have mixed feelings about it. I have a whole rant about sweet tooths—sweet teeth, I guess—that I will save for another time.
AB: I would love to hear it though.
SA: It’s all about hedonism and basically the influence of religion and Christianity in the United States. But I wanted to do something that felt special to people and felt like a treat in some ways. There are ways in which it feels nonessential, but I also think that’s important. Sometimes, just as a human being, I get caught up in ideas of productivity and things being the most effective means, but I understand that the structure and nature of how we move through the world is not linear and it’s not consistent, so sometimes we do need sweetness and care. I mean, we always need sweetness and care.
AB: I was thinking about it, obviously not as the person who’s doing this, but for me, it’s like constantly being bombarded with the news of another Black person who has died or was killed and thinking about that in the context of all the other things that are trying to kill us, you know? And then on Sunday, though, I get to go and pick up some dessert and a love letter. You know? When there’s so many things in life that don’t feel sweet or that I’m constantly trying to unlearn or don’t feel, to use your words, that they were made for me. I think that that’s really significant.
SA: Thank you. Yeah. The thing about doing these events is that when I do Black Feast and we all come together at the table, I directly get to see the impact of what I’m creating and the people that are coming together. And I also get to see the magic that graces that space and graces that room—the magic of when we all come together in community to share with each other. That is something that really deeply motivates me. So, it is a real shift, this model, of kind of blindly putting things out there. And I hope that people enjoy it, but a lot of the time, I don’t know. A lot of the time, I don’t even get to see people because they’re getting the orders delivered, so for me, it’s kind of throwing things—or gently handing things—to the void. You just hope that it’s well-received. You hope that no one hates it. And if you have a very critical, perfectionist mind like I do, you just have to keep telling yourself that people don’t hate the things that you do. So it’s really nice to get that feedback.
-June 28-
|| strawberry shortcake with maple fig leaf cashew cream and hazelnut truffles ||
AB: What was the thought process behind offering vegan, gluten-free, no cane sugar added dessert?
SA: In a simple way, those are my dietary restrictions, so that’s the food that I want to cook and that I get to cook. It makes everything easier for me. But also, many people have dietary restrictions and I try to create something that most people can come to. As a person who does have more than one dietary restriction, it just gets exponentially more difficult to eat out depending on how many dietary restrictions you have.
AB: Yeah. Right.
SA: So I know the joy of being able to see an event that you think is cool and then actually being able to go and eat the food. That is so rare for me and I always kind of dread when something that I want to go to is food-based or has a food element to it because then I think, “Okay, yeah, I really want to go to this thing. I’m going to have to bring trail mix in my bag.”
AB: Yeah. As someone who used to have certain dietary restrictions and now has different ones, but doesn’t always abide by them, I hear that. I guess I was also thinking it’s interesting because we are in a pandemic and this virus is disproportionately killing Black people and people of color. And you know, everybody’s talking about pre-existing conditions. I think part of it is a way to shift blame or make people feel safer than they might be, but when you think about pre-existing conditions, food can be a big part of that. And so, to offer a dessert, specifically to Black people—a sweet, that would in theory potentially contribute to adverse health outcomes, but it’s actually prepared in a really considerate way? I guess I was just thinking about that.
SA: To me, it’s important to show people care in the way that I would show it to myself—and also vice versa. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that, too. But I think part of showing care is: the food that I would make for me is the food that I’m going to make for you. And similarly, the food that I would make for you is the food that I’m going to make for me. To know that I am a part of the community that I’m serving and to remember that. I think that that’s just a big part of what I do.
This interview has been (lightly) edited and condensed for clarity.
Unless otherwise noted, photos were taken by me.
More sweet, delicious things:
Jerrelle Guy’s strawberry spoon cake
Laura Wright’s chamomile iced latte
Chloe x Halle’s new album: The Ungodly Hour