From neighborhood gardens to boycotts, bake sales to community cookbooks, food has empowered ordinary people to build solidarity, expose injustice, and resist. People have used food throughout history and across cultures to reimagine the world they live in and fight for a better future.
This exhibit is a work in progress and we're asking YOU to help us create it! Whether that's voting on the next featured story, nominating a book for our library (coming soon!), or sharing your opinions, we believe that our collective knowledge is so much more powerful than any one story a museum can tell.
Across the country, people are asking, “What can I do?” to fight for human rights and build more equitable communities at home and beyond. We're turning to history to help us answer that question by looking to people who have used food to build community-based social movements.
Curious how this exhibit came about? Watch us create it on Instagram.
It started with a question...
The Montgomery Bus Boycott
FUND
“Her home kitchen became a locus for change.” Gilmore managed black women across the city to make and sell foods to support the bus boycott. They called the group The Club from Nowhere, named to help protect the Club’s members from backlash. Only Gilmore knew who supported The Club and how they were involved. Club members cooked and baked for over a year, making pound cakes, sweet potato pies, fried fish and stewed greens, pork chops and rice. The Club went to beauty salons, cab stands, churches, and even started going door-to-door to sell their food. They were raising a lot of money in support of the boycott. The money that The Club from Nowhere raised helped to maintain a carpool network in Montgomery; the network hired drivers, provided car insurance, and paid for gas and repairs for the vehicles. The idea spread across Montgomery. Gilmore saw this as an opportunity and started a fundraising competition between neighborhoods. “Georgia Gilmore is believed to have raised more money for the boycott than any other person in Montgomery.” It is estimated that Gilmore helped fundraise between $47,000 - $76,000 over the course of the boycott!
from point a
to the club from nowhere
"We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always right to do right."
- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
CARE
section 504 sit-ins
During the 1977 Section 504 sit-ins, disabled activists occupied federal buildings for 26 days to demand accessibility in schools, libraries, trains and buses, and other public services. These historic protests were only possible through organized, disability-led mutual aid. For many, this was the first time they could connect with others across different disabled communities. Protestors learned about each other's experiences and coordinated meals, medical care, and daily essentials for one another. The solidarity built during the Section 504 sit-ins increased pressure on politicians, ultimately leading to the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990.
ARGUE
the right to vote
Advocates and community organizers began to publish and sell cookbooks as part of their communications and fundraising efforts for women’s suffrage. From simpler recipes on preparing tea to complex dishes found at fine dining establishments such as meringue cakes, suffrage cookbooks relied on the expertise of ordinary women. At a time when women did not have any legal control over the household’s finances, submitting recipes or compiling the cookbooks were ways for average women to contribute to the cause. The community-sourced nature of the suffrage cookbooks likely became a selling point as they published a breadth of knowledge tried and tested by housewives. One cookbook even used this opportunity as a way for readers to acknowledge and celebrate their own expertise by including blank pages for documenting their own recipes. At a time when food science and nutrition were just entering public consciousness, the cookbooks positioned the readers as experts in their own right. Contributions from average women allowed the suffrage movement to reach new audiences. Sold door-to-door or at fairs, bazaars, and women’s exchanges (nonprofit consignment stores), women’s associations relied on the power of community to sell suffrage cookbooks by recruiting their members as salespeople. By leveraging the skills accumulated through generations of women and years of testing recipes, the suffrage movement gained access to minds that were not already convinced of the cause. Suffrage cookbooks not only presented lofty arguments for women’s right to vote, they also recognized women as civic participants with a unique skillset and knowledge. By embracing the gender norms and expectations of the time — women as wife, mother, and keeper of the household’s morality — suffrage cookbooks could both repaint public perception of suffragettes and make the case that each woman reading the cookbook had something valuable to offer in civic life.
