✺ I Eat Tings: Not Just What the Tastebuds Wants

✺ I Eat Tings: Not Just What the Tastebuds Wants

This illustration imagines the tongue as more than an organ of taste. It becomes a landscape where memory, culture, rest, music, conversation, movement, and relationship gather, reminding us that nourishment begins long before food reaches the mouth.

Two years ago I hosted an a month long event via Instagram called 

Hibiscus Soul Food Sounds of Blackness

The conversation referenced throughout this essay was originally part of Hibiscus Soul Food Sounds of Blackness, a month-long Instagram series I created exploring raising funds for Sudan while discussing Sudanese and African foodways, Black culture, healing, and embodiment through conversations with artists, cooks, organizers, and community members.

This month-long series explored food through listening, embodiment, and cultural relationship.

Nourishment also includes solidarity, imagination, and shared futures.

An early prototype of I Eat Tings before the project expanded from documenting meals to exploring no

Learning to eat differently begins by listening beyond familiar food traditions.

The series wasn’t designed to romanticize culture or turn it into content.

It asked a different question:

How do we return to relationship with our cultures so they become living practices of nourishment, healing, and everyday embodiment instead of commodities waiting to be consumed?

Returning to this archive two years later, I realize those conversations weren’t simply documenting ideas.

They were planting questions that have continued growing throughout the Bespokecurry Cosmos.

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I went back to watch one of the lives surrounding food recently because in a couple of weeks I’ll be visiting one of the Hom(e)ies who shared that conversation with me. I don’t often revisit my old work. Not because I dislike it, but because I’m usually more interested in continuing the work than looking behind me.

What surprised me wasn’t nostalgia.

It was recognition.

Every major idea I was talking about two years ago is still here.

Not unchanged.

Embodied.

More rooted.

More practiced.

The questions stayed.

I changed.

One relationship from that season remains alive today. In a few weeks we’ll sit together again, this time carrying two more years of living between us.

Another relationship did not survive.

That honesty belongs here too.

Not because I need to reopen old wounds, but because ecosystems don’t tell the truth by pretending everything flourishes.

Some relationships become forests.

Some become compost.

Both continue feeding the terrain in different ways.

Watching that Live, I realized I wasn’t just revisiting an archive.

I was entering into relationship with an earlier version of myself.

One of the conversations that stayed with me from that afternoon was wonderfully simple.

What and how do we feed?

Every ingredient arrives carrying routes, relationships, and memory.

At the time we talked about taste.

We talked about memory.

We talked about culture.

Today I think I would ask a different question.

Not just what the tastebuds want.

Not just what the brain wants.

What does the body need?

That question has quietly reorganized my entire kitchen.

Back then I was talking about eating with your hands.

Today, I simply eat with my hands.

Back then I was talking about African foodways.

Today, African foodways have become part of my everyday life.

Back then I talked about boiling chicken before frying it because that’s how the dish was prepared.

Today I understand another layer.

Sometimes food needs to be broken down differently before the body can receive it fully.

Not because the food is deficient.

Because digestion is a relationship.

Cooking isn’t only changing ingredients.

It’s preparing a conversation between food and the body.

That relationship continues after the meal is over.

The body tells the rest of the story.

I also found myself cringing when I heard myself describe nourishment as privilege.

Not because access isn’t unequal.

It is.

Painfully so.

But I hear the sentence differently now.

Nourishment should not be exceptional.

It should be ecological.

Food remembers histories that the plate alone cannot hold.

During our conversation we spoke about Sudan, where community kitchens have continued feeding people through unimaginable rupture.

Those kitchens are extraordinary.

But perhaps the deeper lesson isn’t that they appeared during catastrophe.

Perhaps it’s that they reveal the kinds of relationships every community deserves to cultivate before catastrophe ever arrives.

The need for nourishment didn’t begin with war.

The war made the need impossible to ignore.

An ecosystem that nourishes one another before rupture doesn’t erase suffering.

It changes what becomes possible when suffering arrives.

The work isn’t waiting for crisis to teach us how to care.

The work is practicing care until it becomes ordinary.

I think that’s what I was reaching toward two years ago without yet having the language for it.

I wasn’t simply talking about African food.

I was asking how we return to relationship with culture.

Not as performance.

Not as aesthetics.

Not as something to romanticize.

But as living knowledge that continues feeding us because we continue feeding it.

Culture was never meant to be consumed. It was meant to be tended.

Just like food.

Just like friendship.

Just like community.

Just like our bodies.

Perhaps that’s why the question keeps returning.

Not what the tastebuds want.

Not what the brain wants.

What does the body need?

Because over time I’ve begun to suspect that when we remain in relationship long enough, those questions stop competing with one another.

The body teaches the tastebuds.

The tastebuds teach memory.

Memory teaches culture.

Culture teaches relationship.

And relationship teaches us how to nourish one another long before the rupture arrives.

The Cosmos Watershed

The Cosmos Watershed is not a bibliography. It is a relational map. Rather than documenting only where ideas originated, it traces how they entered into relationship, what they nourish, what nourishes them, where they continue flowing, and which currents they resist. Knowledge does not move through the Cosmos as isolated facts. It moves like water.

Cosmos Watershed	Tributaries
Companion	From 0 Came 2: Cultivating The Third (soon come); Okra Soup: Threads to Black Futures; Ninki Nanka Grocery Store; The Culture Is For Sale and Yet No One Is Purchasing; Black Herbalism and the Colonial Wild Fire
Origin	A return to the Soul Food, Sudani Dreams Instagram Live recorded two years earlier. Revisiting the archive revealed that the central questions had remained remarkably consistent while becoming more deeply embodied through lived practice, African foodways, gut ecology, friendship, grief, and nourishment.
Expansion	Reframes nourishment as an ecological relationship rather than a privilege or commodity. Introduces the movement from taste → thought → embodied need, while connecting African foodways, Sudanese community kitchens, gut digestion, eating with the hands, and cultural practice into a single ecosystem of care. Demonstrates that archives are living relationships with previous selves rather than static records.
Application	Food justice; African and diasporic foodways; community kitchens; gut healing; embodied eating; cultural preservation; Black community care; mutual aid; cooking as relationship; slowing down enough for food to become embodied knowledge rather than content.
Lineage	From 0 Came 2: Cultivating The Third; I Eat Tings; The Six Waters; Afroscape; Black Beauty School; Trans Learn Tings; Soul Food, Sudani Dreams; gut ecology; eating with the hands; relationship before object; embodiment over performance.
Counter Currents	Romanticizing African food without entering into relationship with it. Food reduced to content, aesthetics, tourism, or appropriation. Nourishment framed only as individual privilege instead of communal ecology. Colonial professionalism separating Black foodways and Black hair from joy, wildness, and everyday embodiment. Crisis replacing sustained community infrastructure.

✺ I Eat Tings: Not Just What the Tastebuds Wants