Everybody Eats

The pandemic not only shifted my approach to community engaged work, but it also exposed dynamics of food and space that I hadn't previously considered. In those precious few days in March of 2020 when it seemed like most people were in fact taking Coronavirus seriously and our city briefly shut down, I was jarred by a very particular kind of silence, a kind of sonic absence of food. After the rampage of panic buying, grocery stores stood still, save for a few squeaking shopping carts making their way down ghost aisles. Once bustling restaurants had their kitchens turned into quiet graveyards, and even after their return, never recovered their dining room's full sound. The sounds of food, the sorting, the prepping, the cooking, the mouths crunching, the plates and spoons clanking, the items scanning and cash registers beeping, along with the conversations that necessitate these activities (and vice versa) seemed to disappear for a swift moment. 

A view of Alfreda's Soul Food on Almeda Rd

Sooner than later, everything seemed to go back to normal, especially in the "food world". Although the sounds were back, the echoes of the silence continued to ring as I attempted to continue my fellowship work. I heard it in the ways that restaurant and grocery store workers were simultaneously deemed essential and sacrificial, expected to return to work under constant risk of contagion with little to no safety nets if they did indeed get sick. I heard it as I learned that Black-owned restaurants were experiencing revenue loss and closure at rates far exceeding their non-Black (especially white) counterparts. I heard it when the Fiesta at the edge of Third Ward in Midtown shut down to make way for the RMC Ion, recalling the conversations I'd had with Third Ward residents who depended on it for more than just food: other survival needs like paying bills, cashing their paychecks and getting quarters for the bus or to do laundry. I hear it as Black and Brown families continue becoming  unemployed and hungry. 

Since March of 2020, I have been recording some of my cooking and my dinners with friends and family. I've also recorded some of my trips to grocery stores (which are few and far between since I'm fortunate to have siblings who work at grocery stores and do most of the house's shopping at their workplaces). I was further inspired by my collaboration with a friend and former colleague on a podcast episode taking a sonic journey through the many ethnic markets in Central Los Angeles, including several places in Koreatown - where I previously lived and organized. Lastly, I've been challenged by my own development as a poet over the past year to question my legibility and expand my conception of language beyond what can be written on a page. 

I've realized there is a sonic element to food that can go beyond the literal and elucidate the connections, histories, struggles, and potentiality of those who grow, cook, serve, and consume it. As I continue to research and connect with individuals in Third Ward and other Black and Brown communities across Houston, I've learned that this pandemic silence has also given way for more and more of us to hear the sweet auspicious, cacophonous sounds of solidarity: The creaking of community fridge doors opening and closing, the thumping of trees being cleared to make way for a community urban farm, the lullabies composed by our bodies as we move to take care of each other. I began this project interested in the potential of food as a language and methodology of confrontation in the context of place-making in Third Ward. I now find myself intrigued by the potential of a poetics of soothing, a poetics of food and space, a poetics of sound as a ritual for us to make it to the other side.