During this time every year, it feels like no one runs out of reasons to hang out, get or prepare a meal together, give each other the experience of their favorite treats, and laugh and talk over alcoholic or non-alcoholic beverages. But even though the holidays seem to give us more of a reason to break bread with others, the desire to make and consume food with the people we love is as persistent as any other human desire — especially for queer and trans people.
In their new anthology of essays, graphic memoirs, and author-tested recipes, Queers at the Table: An Illustrated Guide to Queer Food, authors and researchers Alex Ketchum and Megan J. Elias bring together a pantheon of queer and trans voices speaking on their multi-faceted relationships to food, how they build community around their favorite meals, and how certain foods and experiences centered around food have shaped who they are and how they interact with others. Through the many contributions showcased in the book, Ketchum and Elias manage to create an archive of the experiences of queer and trans people across income and class levels, labor expectations, community organizations, and the various stresses of being alive in a society that is constantly attempting to make our lives more difficult. The people at the center of these stories remind us that we should be unafraid to challenge traditional definitions and cultural norms and to keep the traditions that have carried us through history alive.
As someone who understands the importance of engaging with the history of queer and trans people and listening to each other’s stories in the present, Queers at the Table is a welcome addition to the ever-growing archive of our lives in the current moment. Ketchum and Elias graciously agreed to discuss the book and its development in further detail with me. You can find the highlights from our conversation below.
Stef: In the introduction, you mentioned that this was born out of the Queer Food Conference, and I know many readers are probably not familiar with that and its purpose and its history. What kind of work is presented and generated from the conference? How did Queers at the Table become a product of that process?
Megan J. Elias: We hosted the Queer Food Conference in 2024 at Boston University. We came up with this idea together. I met Alex when she came to visit BU to give a talk in the Pepin Lecture Series about her book Ingredients for Revolution. We put together the conference really quickly, and it was just a wonderful, exciting event. Lots of people came together and talked about queer food in lots of different ways. There was crying and smiling and laughing and cooking.
Alex Ketchum: For the conference, we had a mix of scholars, journalists, artists, activists, pastry chefs, farmers, seed preservers…people all across the spectrum of the food world, from professional to home cooks to students to people who are very senior in their positions. And we wanted to bring everyone together and not have hierarchies around that. We also did a lot of eating together and sharing food together. It was a two-day conference, and it was also hybrid so people could participate from around the world.
Megan J. Elias: Even before we had the conference, Alex had this idea that we could have conference proceedings that were not a “boring set” of essays, but other kinds of writing as well.
Alex Ketchum: We wanted to have that diversity of the queer community, diversity within the queer community, and the diversity of queer and trans identities represented in the volume represented in the book. We thought, “Well, there’s lots of different ways to share information about food,” and again, we didn’t want these hierarchies. So yes, the essay is an important form, but we wanted the essays to be quite accessible, and then comics and art is another great way to keep the conversation going. Then, of course, because we’re talking about food, we needed recipes because recipes are an important form of knowledge translation and transmission.
Stef: From reading the book, these conversations about food are not just referring to the act of consuming food to stay alive. And there are so many different ways people think about food. When we’re talking about “queer food,” you mean something specific and there’s a lot more to it than just buying, making, and/or consuming it. What exactly are we referring to when we’re talking about “queer food”? What do we mean when we say that?
Megan J. Elias: I think a lot of this comes out of us both having a food studies perspective, although we work in other fields, too. But the idea that food is something that you take seriously and that food is always speaking, it’s always saying something. Your food choices are saying something about your aspirations and your goals. It’s never just food. What happens when you put the concept of queerness and the concept of food and nourishment and sustenance together? That’s how I want to answer that, with a question…what happens?
Alex Ketchum: When people ask us for examples, the labor of food is really important to think about. Who’s cooking the food? Who is the food being cooked for? Is the food being cooked to create community? If it’s a queer food space, such as a restaurant, are they having community-centered events or community groups gathering there? Are there fundraisers being held there? Certain types of food also speak to longer queer history. Foods that have been used to nourish people who are dealing with complications from HIV and AIDS, as well as just different kinds of celebration foods. There’s a lot of different ways that people define “queer food,” but some of those ways of thinking about labor and community are key components to that.
Stef: Both of you are researchers who are focused on the intersection of food history and gender and sexuality, and you’ve both authored your own books related to these topics and this intersection. How was putting this collection together different from the research you’ve done on your own for your own books? What did that process look like for both of you?
Alex Ketchum: We had 38 contributors, including us, involved in making this book. So, one of the things that I think was really amazing about doing this anthology — as well as the conference — is being able to create a space for other people to share their work. Earlier on in my career, I got a lot of pushback like “Oh, why would you even study that? That’s not important.” And one of the things that was really amazing was to have folks come up to me during the conference and say, “My supervisors weren’t taking this seriously.” But now that there’s the conference, they see there’s a place for this work. It was especially exciting to just see that we were able to create a space for others to pick up and make more space for this field to grow.
We’re trying to create more spaces for others to continue to write and draw and create, publish, and share and work about queer food. Thirty-eight contributors can speak to a lot of diversity, but it can’t encapsulate every experience. We want other people to continue to take on the mantle of queer food.
Megan J. Elias: I felt making this book was just so different from making any of the books that I’ve done before because I wasn’t working alone. Everything we did we could talk about together. And it was also not about me working through my ideas and being unsure of them and needing more evidence, and having this kind of all in my head on my own.
This was, “Let’s make it possible for the world to hear and see all of this beautiful stuff about queer food.” This was like, “Let’s put on a party.” And then the press was fantastically supportive, and their creative team was just the best you could hope for. When we said, “We think it should be kind of colorful.” They agreed and made it really, really colorful. It has really affirmed the power of community to me as if I ever wondered.
Stef: What did that call look like for the pieces that are included here, and how did you ultimately decide what made it? What was that trajectory like?
Megan J. Elias: It grew partly out of the conference. As we were getting in papers for the conference, we were thinking, “What are the themes that are emerging here?” And I think that our archival training very much came into play as like, “What do you have? What is it saying to you? Let the sources speak.” We were able to identify some themes, and then as the conference was happening, we started thinking about which papers cover particular areas that aren’t covered by others to make sure we have as many voices as possible, speaking from different experiences.
Alex Ketchum: For some of the contributions, there were a couple of people presenting on similar topics, so we asked them to co-write as well, which was pretty cool. I’m a huge fan of graphic novels and comics, so I had some folks in mind for those. We also value people’s labor, so we applied for and won a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Partnership Engage grant, which allowed us to pay all the contributors. With those grants, you have to partner with a community organization, so we partnered with Prism Comics, which is a LGBTQIA+ organization that supports queer cartoonists. Through that collaboration, Tara Madison Avery, who also has a comic in the book, was able to connect us to folks to help us cover different areas and different themes. The comics came a bit more from finding folks through the Prism connection, and then the recipes and the papers were mostly through the conference.
Megan J. Elias: And a little bit through the Queer Food Foundation, too.
Stef: The collection is divided into those five distinct sections — a sort of introduction to queer food, a section on the diversity of queerness within the food world, a section on community care and safety, a section on the environmental impact of producing food, and a section of recipes and the stories behind them. Why do you feel like those are the most important to be represented for this particular anthology/archive?
Alex Ketchum: It takes us from the seed in the soil all the way through how the food develops, the plant grows. It could be foraged. It could be farmed. You’re moving up. Then it’s like who you’re cooking for. You’re cooking for family, you’re cooking for friends, you’re cooking for lovers, you’re cooking through the loss of life and grief of death. It’s going through the stages of life from the stages of life of a plant, and also the stages of life of a person.
Stef: And it’s flipped in the book. You get the more heartwarming, heartwrenching, and relatable elements first, and then you get down to the business of what it looks like when we’re actually doing the work of creating, growing, and cultivating the food that we eat. Then, you close out the anthology with a wonderful little collection of recipes from your contributors. I thought it was a brilliant way to organize this kind of work.
What were some of the most illuminating lessons that you’ve learned from working with other writers and researchers on the topic of queer food? What were some of the biggest challenges?
Alex Ketchum: Honestly, the worst part of the whole thing was just doing the paperwork through my university to pay people, because it was like eight forms per contributor. But everyone was wonderful. People were on time or early pretty much with all their stuff. People were really open and receptive to feedback. And I think, yeah, it was just wonderful. And it’s wonderful to work with Megan.
Megan J. Elias: I’d never done an edited collection, and I’d heard a lot of bad stuff about having to chase people around. But I felt like we were just coming to people saying, “We love what you do, we want to share it.” Working right after the conference was crucial because it kind of felt like these stories just were ready to spill out and we just had to help gather them up.
Alex Ketchum: It’s just been lovely to work with everyone, and people have been so on board with speaking about the work and sharing it.
Megan J. Elias: It was so fun as the pieces came in, “Oh, someone’s got some pages for us to look at. Oh, now they’re inked.” And to see the comics evolve into full color was so thrilling. The recipe testing was wonderful because we each took half the recipes and made those stories come to life in our own homes, which felt like such a gift to be able to do that.
Stef: In your opinion, what necessitated the need for a collection like this right now, and what are you hoping readers will walk away with after engaging with all the different viewpoints and concerns and questions that are represented?
Megan J. Elias: I hope they’ll walk away with ideas for work that they want to do: New ways to write about queer food, new archival projects, new comics, new ways of thinking about food that they made or enjoyed. I want them to see that queer food was always all around them, and then to go out and talk about it more.
Alex Ketchum: Right now, we’re in a period of a lot of targeting of queer and trans communities. There’s a lot of negativity and hatred and violence, and I think this anthology is filled with so much joy. It’s not that it’s only looking at the positives and not talking about the difficulties of life, but it’s also looking at the resilience and the celebration and the loss and the love. I hope that people feel like it’s kind of getting a hug when they read it. I feel like the cover articulates a lot of our goals with the book.
Megan J. Elias: A group hug. It’s a group hug.
Alex Ketchum: It’s a group hug, yeah. I’ve had some projects where I look at it and I feel a lot of anxiety. I look at this book and I smile every single time.
Megan J. Elias: It feels very defiant in a nice way. Nobody’s going away.
Alex Ketchum: We are here and we’re eating and we’re making food and we’re surviving.
Stef: On Autostraddle, I feel like I write the same sentence every other piece: “You need to engage with queer history and also queer present. If you’re not, you’re going to just be so sad.” Of course, I fall into a little bit of a despair about what’s going on, but at the same time, I’m like, “Whatever, man. We’ll be okay.” And reading this book, I felt the same way. I was like, “Whatever, man. We’ll be all right. It’s going to be fine.” It sucks in the interim, but I know that engaging with this type of stuff really helps people kind of stave off that despair a little bit.
Megan J. Elias: Yes, definitely. It roots you to know that you have this history.
Stef: We’re in this together, so it’ll be okay.
Megan J. Elias: We’ve got the food covered!
Stef: Are there any submissions in there that made the final cut that were surprising to you in a way you didn’t expect? Was there something that kind of came out of nowhere in terms of theme or messaging or questions that they’re asking in the piece?
Megan J. Elias: The story about eating for fertility by Ashley Guillory. A lot of my students write about the concept of food for fertility, but they hadn’t written about it in a queer way. It was just so nice to see that common theme. I felt like if anybody picks up this book and they flip to it, they’ll think, “Oh, yeah, I have friends who go through that struggle.” And it doesn’t matter who their friends are. It’s very relatable.
Alex Ketchum: Every time I read through the book, I get something different out of it, because of course, we’ve read through this book so many times as editors, but each time I feel moved by a different piece. I think that happens based on what’s going on in my own life. We’re talking about how much of the writing in this book is situated in history, but there’s also bits of imagination and speculation too, which is why I love Rani Som’s piece. I think about Tara Madison Avery’s piece on breaking bread and cooking for her polycule, and all the different bread she bakes and how much bread she’s being asked to make all the time.
Megan J. Elias: It’s such a funny piece. It’s hilarious, but it’s also really loving and really serious about relationships.
Alex Ketchum: I want to add that sometimes I worry that people try to say that in order to fight all the stigma, queer people only show people ourselves in the best light. But for this anthology, we wanted to actually show the complexity and multiplicity of our lives, where we struggle, and where we shine and everything in between. I still think the project overall is joyful, but in the way that joy is actually a complex, serious emotion.
